Carl - The 100% crop is 100% quality, background artifacts might be due to the heavy processing required to remove gradients and the like from the image... I've still got the camera in the scope and will take some T-shirt flats tomorrow morning and maybe fire up a re-pro on this one... I've been working on the Rho Ophiuchi image for over 2 hours now, and I've discovered that untill I take flats, the image is not going to be worth posting... So tomorrow morning, flats and flat darks will be taken.. Then I'll have another go at it.. The data is there (although only 1hr of exposure) just needs proper calibration before its going to be anything more than a mess!
