I am hoping the community can provide some tips on using the polar alignment tool in EKOS, as I haven't had the best of luck.

When I have roughly polar-aligned the scope (by using the Polar Align Pro app, then adjusting it so Polaris is in the FOV of the ASI294MC-Pro) and try to run this polar alignment tool, it either slews west to the mount limits, aborts and parks the mount to the east, slowly drifts to the east after I issue a Move to Switches command via the HC, or fails to plate-solve the image.

However, when I first go through StarSense Auto-Align and then do an All Star Polar Alignment, I can then use the KStars Polar Alignment feature successfully -- in fact it's very fast, easy, reliable and accurate. A wonderful feature! However, even after that is done and I look through the 9x50 finder or the camera (after returning the mount to its switches), the position of Polaris is actually further away than when I did the rough initial polar alignment, and seems to be at a different hour angle than what Polar Scope Pro shows as the correct hour angle. This confuses me. And when I try to manually point in the same general area (further away from Polaris and at the different hour angle), I still have difficulty getting Ekos PA to work.

What I am trying to do is avoid StarSense all together. I want to point the scope, do the PA, then slew to a few sky locations to build a pointing model much faster than the whole StarSense Auto-ASPA-StarSense Auto routine.

So, are there any tips to how I should initially point the scope before clicking the Start button for the polar alignment? I have reviewed all the KStars and StellarMate documentation, and watched a couple videos on doing PA, but I still need a bit of advice.

These forums do not seem very active, so I thought I would report that I resolved the issue.

In my case, the issue was the Celestron StarSense hand controller. Jasem and I determined that the hand controller is not reporting a change in RA until there has been a change in DEC. Ekos instructs the mount to slew in RA, but it never receives notification that the mount is indeed slewing. I recorded a video of this, and reported it to Celestron but they said it is operating as expected. This seems CRAZY to me -- why would you not report RA values changing when the scope is slewing in RA (until after DEC is moved)? I am very disappointed in Celestron for not offering to fix this with a firmware update, as not only does this appear to be an operational issue but it resulted in many hours of frustrated troubleshooting between me and the KStars developers as well. It's a good thing the NexStar+ hand controller does not have this issue. I am selling StarSense and recommending that others avoid it as well.

However, there is a workaround: Once you start up the mount, move DEC manually using the hand controller. Then and only then, move the mount to its switches and start the KStars Polar Alignment routine. KStars will then be able to see RA changing, and will be able to slew the appropriate 30 degrees each time.