I *don't think* the horrible noise is damaging to the mount. I suspect that is the sound of the stepper motor skipping/stalling.

That's correct. Ioptron confirmed this.

The CEM 26 does have a parking function that defaults to pointing at the horizon on the west side of the mount. This was the same direction my polar align routine was slewing.
After some brainstorming, I believe that I unlocked the RA and manually slewed to a zero position sometime prior to running the Polar Align routine. EKOS was set to autopark after completing the Polar Align. So, I must have been mistaken that the runaway happened between the 2nd and 3rd capture. The routine must have completed, received a park command from EKOS and slewed further west into itself. I have now unchecked "autopark" after completing the Polar Align routine, and I've set the parking position to the zero position.

4. In Ekos Mount Tab click "Clear Parking Data"

Do you know what data this clears? Is it parking info in the hand controller?

Thank you for your help!

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