glowingturnip

i like the theory that a slight mis-align means that your guiding doesn't keep switching on dec - sounds like an excuse for me to be lazy ;-)

just thinking it through, suppose you were taking a picture of the celestial pole, on a slightly misaligned scope, then the sky would be rotating about the true pole whereas your scope is rotating around a close but different point - wouldn't that result in fierce field rotation ? Indeed, stars between the false and real pole would even streak in a different direction than stars on the outsides since the scope then would be rotating against their direction of rotation (all hypothetical of course, I don't think I could get my aligned scope to point at the pole). However, if you were pointing at something on the celestial equator, then you'd just have a very slow drift in declination, all one way for 12 hours, then back for the next 12 hours, so field rotation would be much less and guiding would easily fix it.