Strictly speaking, if you are depending on plate solving for the entire night, you really don't need to star align.
Some mounts, however, won't let you connect when it is not star aligned. In those cases, just do the simplest alignment (one star, if available) and on top of that, simply lie to the mount that you have centered the alignment star without bothering to go through the motions.
When you are not star aligned, the initial goto after polar alignment might point quite a bit away from the target. You can just plate solve and then tell ASIAIR to sync the mount to the plate solved location, and do another goto. If polar alignment was good, this should get you within a couple of arc minutes. Just think of the first plate solve as being a "star alignment."
Rinse and repeat until plate solve tells you that the target is centered to the precision that you want. In ASIAIR v1.3, the "rinse and repeat" part can be automated by telling ASIAIR to auto-center. You don't always want to turn on auto-centered goto; for example when the skies are not dark enough yet to find enough stars to perform a plate solve.
If you are not star aligned, be aware that when you control the mount from SkySafari, the mount will also not go to the right coordinates when directed. All is good if you simply use ASIAIR's plate solving and goto and not even use SkySafari for gotos. If you like eye candy, just let SkySafari show where in the sky you are pointed to; don't use SkySafari to move the mount. For all practical purposes, you don't need the hassle of SkySafari when you are using ASIAIR -- ASIAIR has all you need, and more; it just don't show it to you in picturesque form.
Another thing to be aware of is that ASIAIR no longer will plate solve if you are within 30 degrees from the pole. I think they must have problems with precision with earlier versions and simply won't even attempt a plate solve today. I don't know why though, since you can simply coordinate transform the celestial sphere by 30 degrees to get around precision problems.
Chen
