At the Zenith

Been a busy day in the garden, clearing all the dead and dying plants, cutting the grass for the last time before winter sets in properly. Lucy & Graham loved getting all mucky and playing in the puddles!

Tonight, the sky was almost clear, the clouds were more like an eerie mist that gave small peeks of the stars hiding behind them! The Moon is just past Full, so the light tends to bleach out all the faint details in the sky around, except for maybe Jupiter who's light burns like a fire in the heavens. Tonight I decided that I would try and get some images with the 350d piggybacked on the little StarTravel 80 refractor, and let the mount do a bit of guiding to see how well it kept up with the motion of the Earth.
I was surprised once I came inside and stacked the images to see so many stars, and to be quite honest I don't even know what is what! The camera is off slightly from the scope, need to figure a way to keep them parallel.
I also tried some new settings in the camera tonight, which proved better than before, see here for details.
To say I'm happy with the result is an understatement, before everything was more like little squiggly lines, and the sky was all red and orange even on 30sec exposures.

Tech Details:
Canon 350d, 75-300mm Lens @ 75mm, f/4
Piggybacked on 80mm f/5 Refractor
Mount: CG-5 (Non-GT), dual drives.
Total exposure time: 6 Minutes: 2x 30sec subs, 5x 1min subs
Dark Frame subtracted.
Stacked in Registax
Curves and colour balance in Photoshoppe
No Exif data - all gets lost in Registax, hence this information