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Hey mate, with your guiding it doesn't matter about which program you use if your polar alignment is off from what you say your RA is out by a country mile DEC is quite easy to sort out to make sure your close but RA.. that is the hard one.
You can use the old plonk trick, but you have to have something that accurately gets you where you where last night. i have 3 bricks set into the lawn with 3 holes i have drilled that makes the legs sit perfectly. as for the head mount, i have lines where it was perfectly drift aligned at. This generally gave me repeatable results.
As for maxim it is very easy to guide with and far superior to PHD, in speed of calibration, accuracy of calibration and it also will give you how many arc seconds your guiding is moving relative to your imaging scope. I look at it this way, if your arc sec to pixel ratio on the imaging scope (i will use my set up) is 0.98 Arc sec per pixel and your average guiding adjustments are 1.2 arc per pixel you will loose clarity/ resolution.
To give you an idea, i got caught out on the weekend i have backlash in the DEC which meant that the guiding was bouncing, the average corrections where 1.7 arc sec per pixel. in the images you could see the stars all smeared in the same direction by about half a star either side of where the main star was.. something like this
( ( ) )
so with close to double the resolution in adjustments everything was bung. That is just one reason why maxim is a lot better. If you would like me to help you with it, let me know and i can always do a remote desktop session with you that way i can show you a heap of great little tricks to make your session a lot more productive and easier.
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