Thanks Laurie, Morton, Col and David for your comments, I appreciate them.
@David: I was fortunate enough that the brilliant Venus was visible in the falling dusk light so I was able to focus reasonably well on the planet’s disc although manually pushing the mount/scope combo whist eyeballing the computer screen and tweaking the focus knob could have done with 3 pair of hands, not just the one!
I just guessed the exposure (first time doing this) and using Firecapture, set it to 0.5 milli-seconds and just hoped for the best based on what Venus looked like on the display.
I think that for this particular pass, I was in the ball park as on a couple of the frames, specular highlights are completely blown out.
Cheers
Dennis