a6gerv

Hi! I'm very new to astrophotography and am looking for some help. For my senior project I decided I wanted to build a telescope from scratch. Over the past few months I built a 4.5 inch Newtonian reflector telescope. I only ordered a few pieces, it’s mainly built out of a sewer pipe and I made a dobsonian mount out of some old pallets I found in the woods (don’t worry they were fairly new and are in very good condition). Currently, I use a SVBONY SV205 (7.05 MP) camera but I just ordered a ZWO ASI224MC (1.2 MP I think) that should come in fairly soon. I use sharpcap but I'm not really skilled with it. Right now all I really do is use the capture button and adjust the exposure depending on what I am looking at (3.91 for Jupiter and 7.91 for Saturn, for other things I just mess around with it). I’ve tried to do live stacking but it keeps telling me there's errors and the images come out really bad so I stick to what I know. I know I am not going to be able to capture what I see using my eyepieces but does anyone have any tips for getting better quality images? I’ve been able to see the separation between Saturn's rings with a bit of editing but I am still unable to get color to come through on Jupiter, it’s just a big glowing ball (even with my color filters). With my eyepieces I can see the bands on Jupiter and Saturn’s rings in great detail but I just can't get the detail to translate through to my camera. The images I take with my phone up to the eye piece sometimes come out much better than the ones with my actual camera. Anyway, I am looking for any advice because I need pictures to show with my project and I want to give them decent quality ones. So far I only have about 3 good ones of Saturn, one of the crab nebula (I think, correct me if I'm wrong), many of the moon, and a few halfway decent ones of Jupiter. Also, I forgot to mention I use a focal reducer for taking pictures of Saturn and Jupiter and for specifically Jupiter I use a blue filter and for the moon I use a moon filter I have. Thank you for any tips and if I attached some unedited images incase my long paragraph doesn't make sense.