Last night I had a break in the monsoon clouds in Uganda and set up my CEM25P mount as best as I could, given than I live at 0.3476° N latitude and couldn't see anything with 30 degrees of the Northern horizon anyway due to a hill behind the house. Anyway I used the iteration method of Polar alignment, and had a bit of trouble when my mount wouldn't drop lower than about 1 degree. I had to lower the legs to get down to 0.3.

Anyway, I have a Lodestar X2 guider attached to a 60mm x 240mm F/L guidescope. While taking some shots of M42 this is what my guide stats looked like.



Can someone explain which numbers on here tell me how far off my Polar Alignment was?

Thanks!

Peter

I don't believe you can tell from that screen how far off the polar alignment is other than "not too bad". The number at the bottom for the total RMS and the flatness of the graph are your indicators as to how much guiding is taking place. The smaller for both of those, the better, but even with perfect alignment, atmospheric conditions, wind, etc will play a part in the guiding. If you know what your arcsec/pixel is on the camera, 1.47 may be good enough. The alignment screen that you went through should tell you how far off you are if you run it again.
One suggestion for you, the Drift Graphics are zoom-able. Typically I like to run it about 4 to -4 or tighter. Your 60 to -60 isn't showing you much data because of scale. I thought it also had some auto-scaling ability, but it would appear not. I use the mouse-wheel to zoom the graph when needed.

From what i can see, you were guiding during this time correct? I think if you want to actually see how far off the alignment is in the guide module, you need to turn off both RA and DEC in the control parameters so it doesnt actually make corrections. Then see how it drifts over time. Also the magnitude of star drift due to misalignment will differ depending on what part of the sky you are looking at, so you would need to point your scope at the right part of the sky first. You could perform what is called a drift alignment using this technique. If i am not mistaken, isnt there a polar alignment method in KStars that uses drift alignment to align the mount? (Not the new polar alignment helper, the older one)