Thanks, everyone, for all your comments.
Rumples: I've been working on my collimation for the last few weeks - I'm nowhere near where I would like to be but I'm moving in the right direction. It's amazing how much of a difference collimation makes (I know everyone says that). I spent some time collimating and then thought I would have a look at the moon even though the seeing was bad - the difference was really striking even with poor seeing! The detail is just so much sharper, so it is something I'm going to put more effort into. I'm wondering also if the general blurring in my image is caused by using a very old, low quality 2X barlow? I had this barlow in my astro 'toolkit' - I will replace it with something better next year (after I've paid off all the other gear I've bought)
I will also get an SCT cooler when the bank balance is looking a bit healthier.
iceman: I'd be ecstatic if you would process my images. I have PMed you.
All: I'm using the Meade Autostar Envisage software to capture images - I usually save as .bmp but this morning I captured as .tif files because I wanted to make sure I got more than 8 bits of image data. I save all images - I don't let Envisage do any combining though it happily volunteers to do it for me. I use Registax to stack all images - I didn't actually use the RGB shift on these images, though I used it all the time for Mars - when I have looked at my images I now notice the blue and red fringes so I will use it.
A question to all planetary imagers - how do you focus? I use a Hartmann mask and that is not too bad if the seeing is good, but I'm wondering if I'm getting 'perfect' focus. I've read about using brightness values when focussing on a star - when the value gets to a maximum you are critically focussed. I've heard about using FWHM (Full Width at Half Maximum) and I suppose there is always just twiddling the knob - but what method are you using Rumples, Robert_T, bird and others - your images always seem to perfectly in focus.
Thanks again for all the support - I really appreciate it.
