Hi Grant
Apart from the scale, your image looks very nice overall, with quite round stars and well focused detail.
However, as Pat was hinting at, you have a major mismatch between the camera and the optics. The 320 camera has small pixels and has been designed for use with short focal length systems - and your scope has a long focal length, even with the reducer. As a general rule,you should aim for between 1 and 2 arc sec per pixel for good to average seeing - you have much less than 1/2 arc sec at full fl and less than 2/3 arc sec with the reducer. This oversampling greatly reduces your field of view and sensitivity to no real advantage. You need a camera with much bigger pixels.
To demonstrate the effects of oversampling, the following is a summary of your system compared with the same scope and a QHY8 camera (which has more and much larger pixels):
field of view - QHY8 will have more than 10x the field of view of the 320 (the bigger chip covers much more of the focal plane)
sensitivity - QHY8 will be roughly 3x as sensitive as the 320 (each large pixel intercepts more light than a smaller pixel)
star size - QHY8 will yield stars about 1/3 the size(area) of those from the 320 (each star covers fewer of the large pixels)
this is not to endorse the QHY8 particularly (although it might be a good choice) - there are other cameras with relatively large pixels that would match fairly well to your scope. You could even consider a DSLR and use binning to increase the effective pixel size to match the optics.
This is also not to knock the 320 - it looks like a nice camera, but it does not match at all well with your scope. Sorry to be so negative.
regards ray
EDIT: just scaled your image to 33%, balanced colour to boost red a bit and sharpened a little with unsharp mask - the result is much better than the majority of m20 images found by Google. The underlying image quality is very good.
Last edited by Shiraz; 13-07-2012 at 10:50 PM.
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