Just as a progress update. I went out to my dark site last night to try and get a more accurate polar alignment by eye. No drift align. Basically set my latitude to the 23.4 degrees and pointed in the direction of SCP. I made 2-3 adjustments to azimuth in the first few subs. Latitude seemed to be fine.
Attached are some of the fruits of a night's work.
Andromeda is a stack of 3-5 images (I can't remember how many) with subs varying between 3 & 5 min. Cropped and tweaked in Lightroom.
Orion is a single 5 min sub at 200mm ISO 3200 - tweaked in lightroom (I have another sub at 50mm on Orion thats picked up Barnard's loop after one sub. Which I never thought I'd get tbh
.)
And LMC is single sub @ 5min 50mm F2.8 ISO 1600 - tweaked in lightroom
So much happier with the results and am pretty confident that it's polar alignment that done me in on the first few nights out. But I will practice drift aligning from home in the meantime and work on building up my data for each object. (going to need hours on these things to really bring out the finer detail and reduce noise).
Thanks for the tips along the way guys.