[g__day (Matthew)]

Some observation on my inaugral run guys and gals!

1. The Meade DSI manual is as terse as the sea is wet.
2. A flakey PC that crashes every 15 minutes does not add to ones viewing pleasure (not sure if the DSI is triggering instability on my PC (instant crashes and re-boot, not even a blue screen of death) or if the PC just generally is on its way out)
3. Locating your PC quite a distance from your mount makes focusing a CCD a real pain in the arse
4. As does running a Meade DSI on a Celestron CG5 mount. The supplied software is all largely incompatable between imager and mount
5. You feel like a hero when your first ever shots come in; nevermind that there quality is simply that of a couple of overly shiny lights in the sky, things will improve with patience, skill and acquired technique

I'm curious on the attached shot of Jupiter with its in focus moons why one can't see the bands of Jupiter. Jupiter appears as a overbright white ball. I assume the gain was simply to high? This was taken with limited sky quality on a 5" Mak with the Gain set to 30, Time slices at 4 seconds and the Offset set to 44. About 40 images were taken.

So the obivous question - were does one go to read / learn how to set this beast up correctly? I'm simply Googling on how to run a DSI. Are there links or posts here I should read?

Secondly can anyone spot the newbie mistakes in my setting or describe how to set up the software so Juptier appears even semi closely to as good as it does to the naked eye. The CCD had stablised for a hour or so, dew was present, the CCD was focused until each moon of Jupiter was sharp, and I ran auto set contrast and took 10 reference frames before any other frames were accepted. I also put the tracking box around Jupiter to try and avoid star trails.

I can't see a logic way of turning the brightness down if the gain is already set low. Changing the tioming of teh shot down between 0.2 seconds up to 15 seconds didn't help matters much either!

My first go: