[bluesilver (Peter)]

Hi, i am moving from using the Syscan hand controller to operated fully from a Laptop.
With the hand controller i have to input the time and location information then do a star alignment to tell the mount where it is pointing at.

With the laptop, this is no longer needed, so was just interested to know when i first power the mount on, how dose it know where it is looking at?

I haven't been able to try it out yet as it has been cloudy here for the last month of so.

I have not got a permanent setup and i dis assemble everything every night to pack up.
I have Stellarium, APT, Sharpcap, phd2, and ASCOM installed and all configured

I am sure i might be over thinking this and might be a basic question, but when i set the mount up and turn it on, do i first have to open up Stellarium, select a star, slew to it and then do an alignment on this star before i do anything else?

The reason i am asking is that i want to use SharpCap to do a polar alignment and i am not sure if i need to be running Stellarium in the background first so that the mount is actually running and tracking.

I think i might be making all this sound a tad complicated,

Or is just simply set the mount up facing South as i always do, turn the mount on, open up SharpCap, do the polar alignment, don't worry about opening up Stellarium untill the polar alignment it all completed.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.
Thanks.