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Damien,
Sorry to hear your woes
Can’t follow what you are doing it’s a bit fragmented
Your obviously not polar aligned
Some prerequisites before you start ,
1/ Did you mark your true south line ?
2/ Is you tripod orientation correct , facing true south ? ie: front leg and foot pointing true south. The closer and more accurate you are to this true south line the closer you will end up on your 1st Alignment Star in the field of view
3/ Is your mount in its “home position” with counterweight shaft pointing down the front tripod leg (which is pointing true south )
4/ Did you set up your Synscan handcontroller with correct settings
Latitude and Longitude for your site
Time Zone Adelaide SA +10.30
Current Time expressed in Month / Day / Year, not our way in Australia
5/ Currently I would be using the following Stars between 8.30pm and 9.30pm
for your 2 Star Alignment and Polar Alignment routine ( 2 Star Alignment Stars Miaplacidus and Acrux ) and Polar Alignment Star ( Miaplacidus ) The closer to the SCP and south meridian line for your polar alignment Star the better ( but not passing the meridian line
6/ Did you down load a copy of Stellarium on your home PC or laptop ? This planetarium gives you a map of every object in the night sky at any time all year round , year after year . You can use Stellarium to identify and nominate your Alignment stars and polar alignment Star
7/ Are you using a good centering eye piece ( My recommendation is an Orion 20mm 70 deg illuminated reticle eye piece) as it has a wide field, pretty good optics and good eye relief. Or are you using a software program on a laptop to do your Star Centering
Accurate Star Centering is extremely important for tight polar alignment
8/ As per the Syncan procedure you must perform a 2 Star alignment to determine initially how much error in Az and Alt your mount is away from the SCP. ( eg : Miaplacidus and Acrux ) Then perform a Polar Alignment with your polar alignment Star ( Miaplacidus ) , then you must finish with a 2 Star alignment again ( Miaplacidus and then Acrux ) to determine your resultant error . This process is an iteration and you may require 2 , 3 or up to 5 or 6 iterations to get your error down below 1 arc minute
Your handcontroller displays the Elevation and Azimuth error like this -
Mel=+000 00 00
Maz=-000 00 00
Expressed in degrees , arc minutes , arc seconds
The more zeros from left to right the better
All I’m doing above ( point 8 ) is describing exactly what’s been documented in my Synscan PA routine document
Other than the above points I can’t provide further assistance
Hope you get your mount polar aligned sooner than later
All the best
Martin
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