I had no idea about equatorial mounts and thought they'd be a nightmare to set up and learn. It came today and I just finished setting it up and playing with it for a couple hours. This mount seemed like an affordable way to try. I thought I'd never buy one but I want to try some astrophotography with my short refractors. I don't have an answer to your question but I'm heading down the same path as you. My question is.(for casual viewing) after alignment and with the scope slewed to a target, is it acceptable to make minor adjustments with the hand controller and sync to target? If the answer is yes, do I really even need to do a star alignment before starting Stellarium, or can I just star hop and make adjustments with the application running? I understand that I'm expected to do a star alignment prior to connection. Within the application everything seems to work well. I don't see any option to park or unpark the mount.

While this doesn't appear to be an issue, it makes me wonder if I'm doing something wrong. When exiting the application(s) Stellarium scope reports that the mount is not parked. There are just a couple of issues I'm wondering about It took some doing but I finally figured out how to initialize everything and slew the mount to a target. Today with cables in hand I finished up installing ASCOM, Ioptron, and serial drivers and Stellarium Scope.

Last week I installed Stellarium on the laptop, familiarized myself with the app. The first time out this past summer things went rather well with a quick polar alignment using compass and smartphone 'Clinometer' app the scope slewed directly to Saturn and Jupiter and tracked very well! The Ioptron SmartEQ Pro is my first Equatorial and first computerized mount so it's been a learning experience to be sure.

Smart eq forum