Pro tip: check your polar alignment on a zoomed crop, not the full frame

I spent 3 nights in Flagstaff shooting the Orion Nebula and every shot came out soft on the edges. My stars looked fine when I zoomed out, but a 100% crop showed tiny trailing arcs I kept blaming on my mount. Turned out my polar alignment was off by maybe 2 degrees, which is invisible in a wide view but ruins detail at high focal length. Now I do a quick drift test on a single bright star before every session, takes 5 extra minutes and saves me an hour of reprocessing. Has anyone else caught alignment issues only after zooming into their photos?

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