so an hour or two later it suddenly cleared up, so i set everything back up but this time i couldn't see any stars through the finder scope. checked the caps, RA axis was turned played with the focuser but couldn't for the life of me see any stars let alone polaris. so after some frustration i gave up and used a two star alignment with stars i've never tried to look at before and guessed. took 30 x 30 sec subs of whirlpool galaxy - couldn't see it in the stacked result, but i was impressed with how there was no trailing.
so then i told it to go to ngc 237 (i think) and did 30 x 90 sec subs and again, couldn't see my target in the stacked results, but i was amazed how there was no star trailing.
clearout says noi clear skies tonight, but bbc weather says 3 hours from 6pm so will have fun again with polar aligning then.
all i can think of, as it was so easy to see and align on my first go at polar alignment is that there was a low of dew on the front of the polar scope but wasn't earlier on?
there's a lot of top left to bottom right streaky noise on the final image - maybe high cloud? still, early days is is 30 x 90 subs. its crap, but stars look pretty trail free. not sure how tbh.