I finally had a night where I was able to take my time and setup a proper polar alignment. I had sort of done this before but racing clouds, kids bedtime or rogue puppy had always had me taking pics before I was completely happy with my alignment.
I have a mount that does not autoguide, and I use the ccd drift alignment method found at:
http://www.minorplanetobserver.com/M...ignNoDrift.htm
So anyway, I spent a good couple of hours doing my first real imaging run with darks, flats, dark flats and bias. I think I am doing something wrong with my bias shots though - if I include them, the colour histograms are 1 pixel wide and will not stretch. I am taking 20 0.001 exposures with the cap on.
The other issue I am having is unavoidable clipping around some medium stars. No matter what I do with histograms in Deep Sky Stacker or GIMP, I always end up with unnatural black halos around medium bright stars.
My Deep Sky Stacker procedure is to drop all my pics in, let it do its thing, then align the colour curves maybe with Cyan back a little and up the saturation by 20%. I put the top part of the curves about 30-40% of the way up the loglet.
The attached is 80x90sec shots of Carinae with 20 darks, 20 flats and 20 dark flats taken through an FS-60CB. As I said earlier, I left out the bias shots as they destroy my colour curves. you can see the most egregious examples of clipping towards the bottom of the picture.