Ken I'm no expert but see in your 3 images there's a sprinkling of blue and red dots , these are called hot pixels or noise . To vanquish them you take a exposure the same length with the front of the camera covered to make a dark frame , this is combined with the live image to subtract the noise and hopefully the final image will display less . I have yet to try any long exposures with my ToUcam but with the LPI imager it has a max shutter opening of 14 secs , anything over a sec the image is satured with noise . To counter it i go into the LPIs capture screen and make a dark frame , then when imaging every frame captured is automatically subtracted . Hopefully some of the guys might be able to explain better
