So the reason that line of text is there is we designed AstroHelm to be mounted directly on the telescope facing the sky. We don't want our users to go to Amazon and search for "telescope smartphone mount", get an eyepiece adapter, and found that it doesn't work :)
As for why we don't support adding optics between the phone and the sky, there are a few reasons. The accuracy from phone's camera lens is good enough, and we don't want to introduce complexity. The plate solving algorithm also benefits heavily from knowing the field of view, which you get from phone's built in camera but need user input for custom optics. Finally, supporting smaller field of view means shipping a much larger star database which most users won't use, so it's just a waste of storage and bandwidth. Not to mention blind solving a small FoV would be very slow and not work interactively.
For alignment, we support two alignment methods. You can align it like a finderscope, i.e. aim your telescope at a distant treetop and drag the crosshair over it. Once you begin observing, you can also sync to the object, which should give you better accuracy.
As for why we don't support adding optics between the phone and the sky, there are a few reasons. The accuracy from phone's camera lens is good enough, and we don't want to introduce complexity. The plate solving algorithm also benefits heavily from knowing the field of view, which you get from phone's built in camera but need user input for custom optics. Finally, supporting smaller field of view means shipping a much larger star database which most users won't use, so it's just a waste of storage and bandwidth. Not to mention blind solving a small FoV would be very slow and not work interactively.
For alignment, we support two alignment methods. You can align it like a finderscope, i.e. aim your telescope at a distant treetop and drag the crosshair over it. Once you begin observing, you can also sync to the object, which should give you better accuracy.