[Shiraz (Ray)]

Hi Lewis. your camera will not do 40 below ambient. the spec is approximately 30, which is about what you got (actual value depends on airflow around the camera). In any event, if the temp is creeping up, you may be pushing it too hard - try at 5C or even 10C in warm conditions - even at 10C, the CCD produces only .02 e/s/pix thermal noise. According to the manual, do not try to operate at extreme cooling when the air temperature is high.

re colour, try it one step at a time - maybe the first step is to do as the manual says and try it out with a pinhole during daylight to make sure you can get some reasonable colour. next step is astro without darks, biases, flats etc (make quite sure none of these is switched on) and just try to deBayer some lights with all calibration turned off. Colour conversion doesn't look hard - the SX manual suggests switch on the Colour smoothing filter and the Anti-alias filter – you can experiment with the other options as you gain more experience. Now click on ‘Create image’ and you should see that the grid pattern disappears and is replaced by colour image data. edit: if this does not work, see Bretts post following.

"all subframes are wrong size/channel etc" - ?? sorry Lewis, don't understand this - are you getting an error report?

you mention binning - that messes up the Bayer encoding and the manual warns against using it with a colour cam