Vintage-Tech80 Most people here report that Refresh Deviation button is useless. It almost always reports a large deviation, and it's definitely not due to what she's suggesting, movement of the tripod.. etc..
I can usually lock in my polar alignment with only two full passes through the EQ menu. Get polar alignment deviations once.. adjust till values are small. Exit the menu completely, come back, do it again, fine tune (or often just validate that it's near perfect) and go shoot.
That said.. I run 20 second exposures. I've not had much luck with 30s, but I'm also shooting from Bortle 6-7 skies so may be other factors.
One other trick. A lot of my targets this time of year are directly overhead and when pointed that way, I discovered that the scope is so balanced on its altitude axis that it just sorta flops back and forth in its own gear lash. This produced short vertical-ish star trails. So I added a small weight to the bottom of the scope so that always gently rests against the gears on one side when pointed upward. Before that, I got a larger percentage of rejected frames, and visible trails.
