Hello all - really hoping you can help this newbie out. I was able to complete a polar alignment on my AZ-EQ5 using a QHY Polemaster and it looked like it was pretty spot on. I then performed a 3-star alignment via the mount controller. The first two stars were moderately off, but they were still in the view so I was able to adjust it easily enough. On the third star, it was much closer to center than the first two and it said the alignment was successful.
I told it to slew to M31 and it did it's thing, but it was nowhere to be found when I took a test shot. I uploaded the image to a plate solving site and it showed I was pretty much a full frame to the right of it. I manually slewed where it should be and was able to center it in my frame. I took a short test exposure and was happy with the framing so I took a longer 45 sec exposure and found I was getting significant star trails. I took a 10 sec exposure and everything looked clear but another longer exposure had trailing again.
I had to go back inside for a few minutes and when I came back, I went ahead and parked the mount in the home position and did another polar alignment routine and didn't have to make any changes so that appeared to be good. I started a new 3-star alignment routine and again, the controller said it was successful. This time I told it to slew to M33 and it said it moved to it, but again, it wasn't in my frame. Plate solving that test shot showed it was almost in the same spot as the previous attempt as M31 was just outside of the frame. I'm still not used to chilly night air and took a few more test shots and again, once I hit 20 seconds, i started getting star trails which got significantly worse the longer it was which leads me to believe the mount isn't tracking right. Does anyone have any suggestions of things to check since the controller alignment hasn't given me any errors and the polar alignment appear to be right?
Thanks!
*edit - fixed spacing to help readability