Hi there,
I am a complete beginner in astrophotography and I have been reading a lot about the topic.
I have now a setup consisting of an iExos 100 mount, a modded canon 60d with a 300mm lens mounted on a ball head on the mount, and a raspberry pi 4 running astroberry to control the whole thing.

Everything is connecting fine. I can start Ekos, connect to the mount and DSLR, and take some snapshots.

For now, I completely skip the polar alignment and I roughly position my mount towards Polaris. It is probably not well aligned, the axis where the hole for polar alignment is points roughly to Polaris.

I then loosen the ball head and point my camera roughly to a region in the sky that interests me, let's say andromeda.

Trying to plate solve and sync when Ktars thinks the camera is looking at Polaris ends up timing out (I downloaded all recommended and necessary fits). So I help it a bit by first syncing manually to Andromeda.
I previously pointed the camera roughly towards Andromeda so plate solving is successful and it syncs to the real region where the cam is looking.

Now is when the problems start. When I want to send the mount to a different object in the sky, it seems to go in a completely wrong direction, sometimes even the opposite. The error is so large it can't be explained by a not very precise polar alignment alone.

Did I miss a crucial step when setting up the mount? Does the Parking/Unparking play a role in this (is parking like homing the motors of the mount?)
Or is it because of the ball head that can give the camera a random direction relative to the mount?

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