Koehler Urban Astrophotography

Installed a 2" Orion  Crayford-Style focuser  to the massive Orion CN10 Newtonian due to wobble and shake with the original rack & pinion.  Additionally, this focuser accepts the Baader RCC I  Rowe Coma Corrector  without needing to be modified and without adapters, custom spacers, etc.   Started setup at 8pm with plenty of light left to level the Celestron CGEM DX mount, stick on the counter weights and the OTA and cameras.  With trees now grown so tall to permanently block polaris, used a best guess approach with the mount in the drive.  After focusing on Epsilon Serpentis, started phd2 to begin a drift alignment.  Remarkably, started at only 15.45' off (without using the polar scope)...just dead reckoning.  After an initial over correction, adjusted to 2.66' after several minutes of drift. Initial frame used for plate solving (before polar alignment) showed strong streaking in the top half of the frame (with long dimension of the frame aligned with the OTA)..stronge