Well, I persisted.
Worked hard to get the polar alignment as good as I could - but still not great. I reckon the polar scope wasn't properly aligned with the mount axis (probably cause I pulled it out and replaced it while I was mucking around!)
Focus much better thanks to a Bakhtinov mask.
Unfortunately the only night I had to shoot photos, the nearby football oval decided to turn on its floodlights. Couldn't wait, the targets were dropping fast in the sky. So I put up a screen to stop direct light getting into the end of the tube and pushed ahead.
Star trailing restricted my exposure times to about 15-20 seconds. ISO 800 for most frames. Shooting with ICNR and saving as JPEGs.
Finally had 10 useful frames of the region I most wanted - The Jewel Box through to Estelle's Star.
(Estelle's star - What's that you say
- see here:-
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/s...ad.php?t=62524 )
4 useful frames of Omega Centauri. 5 useful frames of Mimosa and Ruby Crucis.
Many thanks to Ken for helping stack the frames with Registax and to Ken and John for working some magic on my poor data with Photoshop 3.0. (And I have to admit, I did sunsequently hit the widefield with a little Star Rounder magic.)
I'm very pleased with my "happy snaps".
ps. I typed f4 below - I should have said f5 for the scope.