[JohnH]

From time to time I have a night where whatever I do I just cannot get my autoguiding to behave. I guess I am not alone in this. Normally when this happens I do a drift align and try again and it seems to make things a lot better so I put it down to poor polar alignment - normally I just do a carry/plonk (tripod leg poistions marked on the patio) but I guess this will only get me to 1 deg or so.

Now the thought occurs to me that if my alignment is off and I then ALIGN the controller will then try to compensate for the misaligment when tracking (ie the RA motor will run at not quite siderial rate and the DEC motor may run also).

Is this correct? Will a goto GE controller try to run the DEC motor to compensate for a poor polar alignment? If yes then clearly I am better off not doing an alignment and just allowing the RA motor to run at default (siderial) rate while letting the autoguider make DEC corrections?

Am I getting muddled up here? What is your method for AP - do you use the align feature on your controller or not, obviously ALIGN makes your GOTOs better but can it make autoguiding harder? What is your experiance?