[tonybarry (Tony)]

Hi Ritchie,
You appear to have the QC3298 which Jaycar says has a 0.05 lux light limit; I have the QC 3289 which is stated to have a 0.001 lux limit. It does this by frame accumulation - my camera will accumulate 160 individual TV frames to produce a composite picture output every 3.2 seconds.

If your camera also does frame accumulation (DSS Max, or Sense-UP in some camera languages), then it should perform reasonably well (for a colour camera) on astro photo work.

Bear in mind that it won't be as good as a monochrome camera (think GStar-EX) simply because the Bayer mask that creates the colour image also subtracts light to some extent.

Last night I was using both cameras (GStar-Ex and QC3289) to record some images of M104 from my light-polluted Sydney skies. M104 is the Sombrero Galaxy in Virgo and has an apparent magnitude of about 9. The scope is an LX90-8" GPS (not ACF) with a f/6.3 focal reducer, unguided, on Alt-Az mount. I attach the raw feeds here (before dark subtraction and stacking), and the semi-final stacking (167 subs for the GStar, 68 for the QC3289), but no post processing such as the gurus here are able to do.

Note that the grey image from the GStar was Drizzle stacked rather than a plain stack so the end result is larger. I did not have enough raw frames of the colour feed to do the same thing. However Drizzle requires many more images than what I had to get good results - you will note the fine silk-screen effect on the Drizzle stack.

Regards,
Tony Barry