That's pretty good for no tracking... have you tried faster shutter speeds, say 20fps? Even though the image quality will be a bit lower I think the lower motion blurring would be an overall increase in image quality. Would be nice to try it and see.
The first shot is great David! Easily your best! Well done.
If you don't mind me offering some advice though, I wouldn't get carried away with resampling (2x or 3x or 4x), the image quality just doesn't stand up to it and all you get is the high contrast features showing but nothing else. And it adds in a lot of grain.
There's nothing wrong with itty bitty Mars images through a 10" dob with no tracking. Worry about image scale when you get your tracking sorted, then you can stack the barlows or get a 5x powermate like I did.
At least with the small images, they're sharper and show more of the finer detail.
i have noticed that since using raw and resampled x2, astra image does not stand up as well. As you say, i may be introducing too much grain???
Stop selling yourself short, of course I will take what you say on board. You and Bird and Rumples do not preach to us noobies, you educate and offer alternatives and short cuts. Much appreciated!
I will try with out it (resample) and see what i can get.
DP, resampling by about 1.5x or so should be ok, you might try that and then downsize the end result by 1.5x to get back to the original size. Sometimes this can help hide artifacts that are introduced by the processing.
In theory you should be able to resample much more, even by 4x like you tried yesterday, but I've found when I try this that it effects the processing - registax can lose track of it's alignment if there's not enough contrast in the image, and resampling by a lot also reduces contrast between adjacent pixels.
All the processing steps are interconnected, so changing one thing (eg by resampling) changes the way all the later steps will behave. Not necessarily changing for the better, sometimes the changes can be very bad, but there's only one way to find out, by trying and see what happens