I bought a copy of Sharpcap Pro which has a variety of astrophotography uses including polar alignment. I tried it last night with excellent results. The process is a bit similar to Photopolaralign but it’s fully automated. You take a pair of pictures rotating the mount 90 degrees around the polar axis between them and it tells you how far and in what direction to move the mount to correct your aim. You make the adjustment then keep taking pictures while it watches until you get as close as you care to. The image below is a bit hard to follow but it’s telling me that i’m within a couple of arcminutes of correct which is excellent. Sharpcap is doing the same plate solving that my earlier process was doing but it has its own built in indexes and it solves in milliseconds rather than 10-20 sec. Sharpcap would control many kinds of cameras directly but not my DSLR so I had BackyardEOS continually taking pictures while Sharpcap monitored the folder looking at the latest. Despite my newbie fumbling i was done in 10 minutes after it got dark.
Astrophotography Newbie 