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Suggest you persevere and give it a chance to show what it can do. Welcome to the world of software patched together by one overworked engineer to support a small number of devices - be happy that you got it working.
1. The colour cast is probably skyglow and it is there because there is no processor trying to do a colour balance for you (as you have with the 5D). Even a $10k OSC will give you exactly the same. Easy to fix it up in the processing.
2. Hot pixels are very easy to get rid of - any decent software has bad pixel mapping and dither has been suggested earlier. Bad pixel mapping is possibly the best way to use your camera rather than full dark calibration, since the Sony chip should be fairly low noise with cooling. Since there is no set temperature, you would need darks taken at the imaging temp for best effect - so use bad pixel mapping if you can.
3. The dirt should not be there, but the results can easily be got rid of using flats (unless it is a huge lump). This will also correct vignetting effects.
The main advantage of this camera is the cooling, which will produce lower noise than an uncooled DSLR. It is not designed to work without cooling, since it does not have all the signal processing stuff that a DSLR uses to manage noise. The cooling hardware looks a bit underdone compared to other cameras with similar chips, but I would guess it will still work OK in normal temperatures. It also has extended red sensitivity and 16bit conversion, which will give a larger dynamic range than a DSLR - also significant advantages for astro imaging.
Good luck and post some more pics.
Last edited by Shiraz; 26-10-2012 at 11:17 AM.
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