Orion starshoot 4, poor quality

[Marcus]

I was quite excited to open up the starshoot 4 and take some pictures of Jupiter high in the North last night. Unfortunately all I get is the same thing I had with my homemade Logitech camera setup, see the photo below, a white disc with poor resolution and little white dots for the moons.
I have the included "Webcam monitor" software and spent half an hour fiddling with gain, brightness, contrast etc etc, turning gamma up made the picture soft-focus and smoother but no hint of planetary features with any of this.
I am using a Bintel 200mm Newtonian and tried with and without a Barlow reducer, which made no difference.
Very frustrating, has anyone encountered this and overcome it?

edit: the picture below is a stack of 30 or so, but the original single shot photos were pretty much identical

[Scorpius51 (John)]

It doesn't appear to be in focus. Are you sure the camera sensor is in the focal plane. You may need to either reduce or extend the focus tube length to suit the camera, physically or optically.

It also looks quite blown out - over exposed. Was the gain too high. If you are stacking frames, then you need to reduce the image brightness.

Were seeing & transparency OK at the time?

[Marcus]

Originally Posted by Scorpius51

It doesn't appear to be in focus. Are you sure the camera sensor is in the focal plane. You may need to either reduce or extend the focus tube length to suit the camera, physically or optically.

It also looks quite blown out - over exposed. Was the gain too high. If you are stacking frames, then you need to reduce the image brightness.

Were seeing & transparency OK at the time?

It certainly wasn't completely in focus but it was focussed as much as possible. I.e. focussing in and out both made it worse. Unless it was supposed to be somewhere else completely where it would also have been in focus??

It was very overexposed. However I turned both gain and brightness to zero and moved up from there, it didn't help, just got a dimmer white disc. Seeing and transparency were say 7 out of 10, I could see the bands on Jupiter with a 15mm eyepiece.

[Marcus]

I am thinking if I fill the screen using digital zoom perhaps it will light-meter based on the bright object rather than the night sky.. will try that tonight..and try to improve collimation