With all these cloudy skies about all I can do at the moment is think about using my telescope which has led me to an interesting thought and quite possibly a realisation that I may have been doing things wrong and making matters worse rather than better....
My polar alignment isn't spot on, it's good, but not spot on. Definitely good enough to get a decent guided session going without visible field rotation over a few minutes, so I'm not really having a problem imaging (except for the aforementioned crappy clouds).
What I was thinking is if you do the following:
- Setup telescope
- Don't 100% accurately polar align
- Do a 3 star alignment.
- Go to dinner, read a manual, try find something interesting in a star atlas, etc. Something that takes more than just a minute.
- Slew to somewhere else, and .... you can't find your star.
- Find your star and add it as another alignment star in EQMOD.
Now. Is the model of my sky distorted? I ask because I've had this issue recently which resulted in me not being able to accurately slew to any of the objects I was looking for even if they were part of the original 3 star alignment.
Does this make sense? If my polar alignment isn't spot on I should basically leave no time between doing a 3-star alignment and slewing to my target if I hope to find it right? Obviously the correct answer is to do a proper drift alignment before I do anything fancy, but my train of thought is correct isn't it?