Hi Peter and Troy,
Just a final update on progress with Neb, after another day of emails with Craig Stark and IIS.
Thanks for your inputs Troy, that's basically the final procedure I've come to as well. It turns out there are some very good tutorial docs on Craig's website in the help section (Duh!), which answer pretty well all the questions and show a walkthrough approach, same as yours Troy.
One small gotcha we finally figured out this morning is that if you use the ASCOM driver for Neb, you also lose the ability of Neb to automatically read the Fits camera info, and so it gives the popup box asking for pixel and offset. If you use the WinUSB driver and QHY8 camera in Neb, all goes auto according to plan. Not rocket science, but there's no warning to tell you of this. I suggested to Craig it would be good to include such a caveat in the next version of docs.
Surprisingly, he's also going to implement a rather trite suggestion I made to him to rearrange the Batch menu choices to reflect the actual processing flow, as it's a little easy to forget the debayer step before aligning. He agreed and said it will be in the next update version!
So, I've now got Neb working fine all the way to stretch & levels plus some basic post processing, ready for PS or AI. The Batch Pre-proc system works well with darks and flats, and the drizzle in align and stack is also good. All I need now are better imaging skills. That's purely a time and effort investment.
Peter, DSS works just fine too but has a quite restricted repertoire. For the time being, I've decided to go with Neb as it seems to be capable of doing all my entry-level imaging and processing tasks in a very user-friendly environment, for a reasonable price and backed with great support. No doubt Maxim et al are far superior, but I would like to expend my next learning efforts to PS, when my skills can do justice to it.
Last week's clear skies gave me a wealth of new QHY8 FITS to play with during this week's clouds
Galaxies can be a bit tough, can't they?