Happened back upon this thread and felt compelled to clear up a point: It's not having the celestial pole in view that's an issue with PAA and long-focal-length optics, it's the alignment triangle. If you weren't pretty close to start with -- always an issue with us itinerant imagers, not so much with those who have the luxury of leaving their setups undisturbed -- then the alignment triangle is going to extend beyond the FOV. So you have to iterate the PAA procedure until the target is within the FOV. For example, with my AT8RC and 183, the FOV is about 20' wide. Hard to eyeball the mount to that level of precision, especially with Polaris not in view!

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