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Raymo I feel your pain. I am going through trying to develop some imaging expertise and at 65 it is a steep learning curve and damn expensive. What the heck is an OSC anyway? The jargon curve is steeper than the tech curve.
I am using my son's Canon 450d DSLR, and struggling to get decent exposures from even my AR102 f6 widefield scope on an NEQ6. Frankly, by comparison, my 16" Pushto Dob is just so easy to use for visual observation, that astrophotography seems to be completely different world where much time gets wasted with setup, power systems, software, etc.
Last week at the Bretti dark site, I was messing around for hours with polar alignment, tuning error out of the mount, getting the camera in focus, setting up the intervalometer, etc while the visual guys were touring the wonderful objects on offer and I had to listen to the Oh wows! coming across the field. Where is the joy? Poor Jakob (much more experienced in imaging) had his ED80/HEQ5/PHD/Nikon DSLR system setup and running exposures on the Leo Triplet and then he realised that he had his camera set on auto, and not bulb, so all his time had been wasted up to that point. Jakob was running the Orion Guidescope and Starshoot guide camera and was achieving amazing precision in tracking but nothing to show for it. Now as a result of his tutorial on PHD and guiding I am diving into that as well = argh.
What I would like to see is an "Easy Guide to Imaging" but I expect it doesn't exist. There are as many opinions as people attempting it.
There have been some helpful people on ISS that have responded to my uninformed questions re DSLR use and I thank them for that but it very hard to start from a zero base if you have been a visual astronomer for many years, and I suspect it is dulling my astronomy experience - to what gain?
And I haven't even stepped into the complex world of image processing yet.
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