Fantastic. I really appreciate the help from everyone and it's got me keen to really try a few minor changes.
Brendan, I didn't realise the 40D was genuinely capable at deep sky until I saw some of your images. You must be rapt with them! I am really keen on the idea of stacking and read up about the ability to statistically lower your noise to help in post processing. After reading up about it, (and having done 2yrs of uni maths for my eng degree and hoping I would rarely use it again!) it actually makes quite a lot of sense. So for now I'll try to get my basic skills up and running but you've given me some insight into this. I'm just worried about field rotation at the moment and whether this will affect stacking as I just can't wait to hook up and start clicking. I have learnt to drift align but the temptation gets the better of me for moon photos - I do a rough level and south align though
! Thanks mate!
Adrian thanks mate for the appraisal
Chris, once again you've given more to think about which really opens up some of the finer points to think about which before a few days ago, I had not even contemplated. I see your point about the Jupiter example. I am assuming that at the same temperature and same setup, a stack of say 50 DSLR images would be better than 50 mid range astro CCDs?? Obviously the CCD seems far more suited to the job overall but if you didn't have one yet... Thanks again for your advice
John, thanks too for your comments. It is hard to show the detail on the site. I will need to register at one of the main online photography joints so I can link some higher res pics but this is crux of my issue and after seeing some gems on this site, I just wasn't sure whether I was hitting the limits of my very ordinary gear. I don't think I have yet. I really want to get into the nitty gritty so that when I upgrade, it is not a dissappointment because of some failure to understand the simpler basics of astro photography and basic processing.
Thanks all for you comments and I'll keep pressing on here in the south west (provided the smoke and fog stays away long enough down here in Collie
)
Darrin...