After looking at the images taken by Kinetic I decided to give his short sub method a try. Using my VC200L and QHY8 I set out to take 200 30 sec subs. Well high level cloud came in and ruined this exercise. I ended up with 174 subs which looked OK. Running them through IP3.5 and using the auto grading system I ended up with 154 usable subs which were combined. The resulting image was a lot better than I thought I would get without any calibration files at all.
Probably a little to much sharpening of the stars due to high cloud but thems the breaks.
VC200L at f6.4
QHY8
Fully guided with QHY5 and ED80
Nice effort Doug. Personally, I think you should have stuck it out with longer subs. Yes, too much sharpening as you indicate. This has resulted in heavily saturated stars (a little on the crunchy side). The data also appears to be black clipped. IMO, not your best work, but with time I'm sure you'll get the result you're after using shorter subs.
I was gonna suggest black point clipping too. I would use a shadows and highlights to reduce the black point clipping.
Like Jase I am an advocate for long subs, signal strength will always be better than using short subs. Just an observation but worth considering the benefits. You can always do some shorter subs and mask these in for the blown areas.
