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Funny that this should come up at this time. I have been manually drift aligning for quite some time as its my prefered method. Ive tried K3CCDTools, bought WCS and tried EQAlign. All are great programs except for one thing. They need a long time - at a minimum 10-15 mins in both North and East/West to align to the pole. Then a repeat itteration to make final adjustments. Slow tedious and booooooring especially as in most programs have to use a webcam, know the lat of your observing site, the dec of the star (in North) etc etc and it can take 30-40 min to properly polar align for imaging.
I got quite good manually as I knew instinctively how much to adjust the star by looking at the drift.
But now I have just tested a beta version of a program that gets you precisely polar aligned - using an illuminated reticule, laptop and not a camera or anything else except a scope and your eye- in 5 min max (to do two itterations but one is generally enough). This product should be available soon and works brilliantly in the Southern Hemisphere which most forget about. And guess what its stupidly simple to do. Each step is almost done for you (especially if you use EQMOD or a planetarium program - or you have a goto system).
You dont have to worry if you are using a reflector, refractor, right angle prism or what ever.
It just works and works just out of the box.
When its available Ill let the forum know. Sorry to be a tease but its best people know that this is great, simple program before they purchase some other thing.
Regards, Allan
I should add that my last alignment put me within under 30" from the pole (1 iteration) and less than 10" in both alt and az in 2 iterations.
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