Just got home after spending 5 weeks with family in Texas. The sky was very stable over there, but the only scope available was one we bought for the grandkids a couple of years ago for US$200 at COSTCO - a Meade 90mm refractor on a DS2000 tracking altaz mount with 497 goto handset and a few ordinary EPs. I had put a short 2x Barlow and my trusty old QHY5c super webcam in the luggage (doesn’t everyone..), so we had a system. And it all worked fine. The Meade mount was quick and easy to set up and it tracked well if there was no wind to cause wobbles, easily holding a planet in the centre of the Barlowed QHY5. The OTA turned out to be optically quite good as well, producing nice clean diffraction patterns on stars.
Attached are a few images, showing that if the air is stable, you can get fairly interesting solar system images from a really bottom end system. The colour balance on Jupiter is a bit odd - always has been from the QHY5 - and the Jupiter and Venus images needed super res processing to extract maximum detail (I agree that I overdid the processing), so there is some fixed pattern noise. The QHY5 has 1.3 Mpixels, so the lunar image is quite wide field - and the OTA did a good job all the way to the edges. Everything ultimately worked pretty well - I would not have been surprised to find that I was wasting my time, but it turned out that solar system imaging with this class of scope can be fun if expectations are realistic.
Flipping fabulous!
Keep pushing that envelope Ray, it's amazing what can be done with entry level gear.
BTW, Michael Covington posted an image of Jupiter last night that is on par with yours, and his was taken through an 8" scope. So you can give yourself a well deserved pat on the back.
That's hot! I want one 
