Hi crash. Both the Small Magellanic Cloud and Large Magellanic clouds would have been right down on the southern horizon last night, with the SMC east of due south and the LMC west of due south. Can you describe where you think you saw the galaxy?
Its unlikely that many galaxies would be easily seen through 10x30 binocs as even the brightest are very faint. The three exceptions are the SMC, LMC and the Andromeda Galaxy (which won't be visible till spring/summer in the northern sky). You would certainly be able to find many globular clusters though. Omega Cent, 47 Tuc, NGC6752 in Pavo, NGC6397 in Ara, and if you look really carefully NGC2808 in Volans.
Any pics you took would be in colour using a colour camera. The problem would be holding it still enough for long enough for the CCD to pick up enough light to show an image. What's the longest exposure you can do with your camera and what is its fastest ISO setting (400, 800 1600 ?) That's if it can be changed. You might be able to get some wide field shots but unfortunately even unzoomed, taking shots around the pole you may be restricted to only about 20 sec before star trailing occurs.
A rough formula (if you are using a fixed tripod and not tracking) for stars close to the Celestial Equator down to + or - 50 degrees from the equator is 700/FL (Focal Length of imaging system). This give you the exposure time before star trails start to become obvious. So at the Equator if you are using a 50mm lense or equivalent then you only have around 14 sec. From + or - 50 degrees to the pole then its 1000/FL, so you will get a slightly longer time of 20 sec.
20 Sec @ISO1600 may just be long enough to catch Omega centauri. It should also be long enough for some of the stars of the LMC and SMC to start to come through, but probably not many. The attached wide field image is one of Omega Centauri taken with just a camera and lens (though it was tracking). The details are ISO800, FL 90mm Exp 35 sec. If your camera can do ISO1600 then you can lower your exposure time by half to 17 or 18 sec. But from the above formula to get it without star trails at 90mm your exposure can only be 11 sec (its declination is about -47 degrees). So to increase your exposure time you will need to use a shorter FL. If your FL is only 50 MM then you exposure length could possibly go up to 20 sec, though that will be close to long enought to start to trail.
To do it through your binoculars then you need to work out the Effective FL of your Binocs and camera setup first (this is a form of afocal photography by the way). EFL = FL of camera lens X Magnification of Telescope (binocs). So if your binocs magnify 10 X and you use an unzoomed camera (FL 25?) then your EFL is 250 mm. If you look at this in context of the formulas above you will only get an exposure time of around 4 sec. Not long enough. So maybe you can try to image without going through the binocs for Deepsky Objects and use the binoc technique for the moon, jupiter and Saturn where the exposure times will be in fractions of a sec.
Sorry I've written an aweful lot here but I hope you get the gist of it. You don't need to get a special camera as long as you can get exposures of 20 sec or longer. Oh and preferably get a mount that enables you to track. With ALT/Az tracking you could get up to a minute or more before trailing becomes too obvious (though you might have to crop some of the outer part of the image away), but with an equatorial mounting properly aligned you can track all night if you want.
Hope this helps
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