[peter_4059 (Peter)]

Well I finally made some progress this weekend. I've been trying to eliminate the flexure in my system that has been limiting my exposure duration to a couple of minutes and I think I've finally isolated the source to the guide scope.

I recently purchased an old finder scope and have set this up for guiding after machining an adaptor to allow it to accept a webcam. I also fabricated a bar to allow it to mount firmly on the top of my Newt.

The clouds parted for an hour tonight and I managed to shoot 4x8 min subs of NGC1977. I ran the subs through deep sky stacker and after 32 mins I have 1.3 pixels of drift. Previously I was consistently getting 0.5 pixels per minute. I suspect the focuser on the guide scope is the culprit and will now be able to concentrate on this knowing the Newt is unlikely to be the source of the flexure.

Here's NGC1977 4x8mins with the DSI II - no darks but I'm pretty happy with the round stars!