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It ended up at 4am before I got too tired, but by then I tracked Jupiter for 45 minutes on the C9.25 and it drifted from the dot being centred on Jupiter - to the dot approaching its edge - drift mainly in DEC - so that is very good news, a drift of say 10 - 12 arc seconds going off Juptier's angular diameter versus the diameter of the Canon's central finder dot. Also I spend most of my time tracking on the MAK when Jupiter was low in the horizon and the SCT when it was high - so I need to swap scopes and observations around to directly compare results.
More good news for the C9.25 - shots of the Helix nebulae unguided at 600 and 1,000 seconds also showed only consistent star elongation - not drift.
So I am begining to put this down to mirror shift in the SCT during polar alignment, not constant mirror shift with elevation (a far stranger happening) that caused a large part of my problem.
Detection and diagnosis last night was slowed wayed down when shots from the Canon kept dissappearing (not going from DSLR Shutter -> Canon driver -> Canon Zoom Browser. I kept losing long shots after two or more shots! I eventually had to shut ZoomBrowser down to get it to receive just a single shot. I finally realised at the end of the night / morning that all my RAW files had somehow changed association to Maxim DL or DSLR - not ZoomBrowser - so I think running PEMPro or the wrong Maxim product at some stage in the evening changed the Windows files associations of RAW files so ZoomBrowser never got to see the shots - annoying gremlin!
My biggest take aways from all this is never give up, and always be cautious drift aligning off a SCT where mirror movement might throw off your results. Had I drift aligned off a smaller MAK or refractor I might have just saved 8 months of effort and frustration!
So I'll keep folks posted - and as I said next step - colliminate the SCT, then work on improving PE as best I can (I think I'll train PE off the MAK, not the SCT after this experience).
The effort, skills and experience that is required to have your gear set up optimally for long duration, long focal length imaging really is something!
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