Thank you all for your replies. I will go out and tell my mount "it's not you, it is me". And then I will go through the setup again.
To answer specific questions:
- Yes I did level it, I'm always careful with that. How accurate do I have to be? I use a spirit level and as long as the bubble is between the lines I've called it good, do I need to be even more careful?
- I aligned the 'N' marked leg with true south as best I can determine it. I have an electronic compass that allows me to take magnetic declination into account (which I grab from http://magnetic-declination.com/ ) Achernar is pretty much straight south and as I can judge from where the leg is and Achernar is it seems pretty good. I've done a 30s exposure and it shows some drift of the stars, which indicates a slight misalignment.
- When I adjusted I used the hand controller. You are right, always start with the simple solutions
Occam's razor and all.
- I have grabbed my location off the GPS on my phone (not using decimal, using degrees/minutes) which should be enough?
- Date/time is set accurately, within a minute(probably even far better than that) of actual time I'd say.
- I shall spend some time doing better polar alignments next time I am out. Would prefer to use the time observing rather than aligning, but hey, I suppose there are no shortcuts, at least not the first few times.
Again a big thank you to you all for your inputs, I shall attempt this some more, but now it feels like I can be certain it is user error rather than a problem with the mount. If I can get whatever object visible in the finderscope I call it a win. If I can see it in the eyepiece (40mm when I look for stuff) it is total victory.
-daniel