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I fight with polar alignment and focus.

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Welcome to the club! The best way to get a good polar alignment is to drift align. If you do a google search on drift aligning you will find a large number of sites that explain the process.

Regarding focus, there are a couple of ways to go. First, do not bother trying to get focus through your camera's back of camera LCD. You will want to hook the camera up to the computer or take images and download them to your computer to verify focus.

There are a couple of good aids available to help get to good focus. The first one is the Bahtinov masks (do a search) which will give you a specific diffraction pattern as the scope approaches focus, and when in focus. Another aid that I use most of the time that's really easy to use and very accurate is the Stiletto IV knife edge focuser. I can focus my scope in 15-30 seconds with that device and did I mention it's very accurate?

Regarding the rest of your setup... as note above, it's not going to be the most user friendly imaging setup. You have two things going against you. First the mount is overloaded with the 8" Newt and secondly, the mount's accuracy in terms of periodic error is not good enough to handle a 1000mm focal length scope. It sounds like you're imaging without guiding and you will never be successful at that focal length without it.

I would suggest that you replace or supplement your current setup with a small refractor on at least a CG5-GT mount or better yet, a Sirius or Atlas mount. You might even be able to image with the 8" Newt on an Atlas mount.

Clear skies,

Patrick

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10" f/6 Truss Tube Newtonian
Celestron C6S-GT SCT
AT66ED Refractor
Oberwerk Ultra 15x70 Binocular
475B Geared Tripod & 501HDV Head
Celestron Regal 8x42 Binocular
Canon XSi; Meade DSI;SPC900-NC
Vixen GP2 Photo Guider Mount


My Astronomy Pages

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After I stack, I do nothing. That was the question, what to do next. Thanks for the book reference.

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After stacking in DSS the resulting images will be almost non-existent without post processing. The real work is using Photoshop or Pixinsight to bring out the data that's hidden near the dark end of the brightness spectrum. Start with simple histogram changes and using Curves or Levels depending on what software you're using. Generally, I spend as much time working with an image as I did taking the images in the first place!

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10" LX200 EMC Classic
Milburn wedge
Peterson Eye-Opener system
2" Dielectric Diagonal
JMI NGF Crayford focuser
Meade DSI Pro III
Meade DSI Pro I as autoguider
Piggybacked Stellarvue SV80ED

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