[g__day (Matthew)]

And a hint from a newcommer to astrophotography and auto-guiding, the better your alignment, the less frequent and over-bearing your autoguiding commands will be.

It should be obivious that the better you're aligned the less work your auto-guider has to perform. Ideally if perfectly aligned you'd only be correcting for PE manifesting in your RA. Now auto-guiding can under or over correct, so its not a perfect solution. The less you have to do, and the less frequently you have to correct the better your longer shots will look by far.

If your auto-guider is correcting every 1/2 second - don't expect 200 second shots to look fabulous. If you only need corrections every 3 seconds (you're probably less than a 20 arc minutes off polar alignment) so your shots will look much better. If you only need corrections > 5 secs - you've probably set things up pretty well (assuming short corrections triggered by a 1/5 of a pixel movement) and you can guide off much fainter stars if corrections are needed less frequently.

So as precise as possible polar alignment and focusing are - ultra critical - keep at it and you will enjoy this immensely!