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Actually.... if I stick a 5x barlow into the mix will that take the scope over it's maximum magnification? I am reading that to calculate the maximum usable magnification, before things start getting worse, its aperture x 2 so, on the 102mm starwave that's going to be 204x magnification. Sticking a 5x in would take it up to 572 times magnification which I would imagine is going to give very poor results. Would this necessarily matter though? for imaging?

The wife isn't going to like this......

Sorry I meant the planet, not the whole image, but yes, that was more what I was imagining. I have a Baader Hyperion 5mm eyepiece attached to the DSLR, both optical sections of the eyepiece are in place, so its a proper 5mm not the 15mm or so you get if you remove the 1.25 inch nosepiece from it. Looking on the astronomytools it looks like adding a 4x barlow will make a huge difference, guess I just fancied a bit of advice in case theres something fundamental I am doing wrong in either the capture or the processing. Ed.

The youtube video aside, I have looked at the image produced from stacking and its eight pixels wide, is this normal? I have attached it, looks like it's out of focus to be honest but I can't get over how small it is!

is a Barlow the only difference then?

Hey folks. I am very much a beginner at astrophotography, I had a nikon D800E and I bought an ioptron Sky tracker about two years ago with which I got a satisfying picture of Andromeda, although to be honest someone else did the processing. I wanted to move forward a bit and over the last couple of years I have acquired a skywatcher NEQ6 and what I believe is an altair 102mm refractor. I recently picked up a set of Baader Hyperion eyepieces and thought I was in a position to try and get a decent shot of mars. attached is a pic of the equipment as its usually set up. capture and focus is not the issue, I dont think, trouble is I dont know what the root problem is! so, I have the scope and the camera all set up, I am tracking my target, I am recording ten minutes or so of video which on the D800 is in MOV format. I have bajillions of tools available to me, I have an adobe licence with premiere pro and photoshop, I am an IT guy, I can get software, but the captured image of mars is just so damn small and the frame is so huge. I am watching youtube videos like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQagPJ8pM7Y and the image in the viewfinder is massive, all the tutorials on post processing in registax or autostakkert have large, clear images of the targets. I have a tiny group of about 16 pixels. I am capturing video at 1280/720 60FPS but even with the magnification I have from the 5mm eyepiece, I have literally nothing to work with. The raw MOV file is here https://www.dropbox.com/s/7yw522qs3h5eda9/_REM6225.MOV?dl=0 What can I do to improve the workflow? Currently its capture -> registax -> nothing. it all dies because the image is too small to put any align points on. its just a single dot.

Ahha! ok I am pretty sure I have been entering dd-mm-yyyy, I also spotted the daylight saving time thing a couple of days ago, I had to look that up. I always thought daylight saving time was a winter thing which apparently its not. I will go have a try with this now. /update/ Yes thats significantly better! It's daylight here, well, ok its overcast and miserable so I am using skymap mounted on a bar to have a guess at what the mount is pointing to, but it was pretty close to its first target, Arcturus, second target was Capella which to be honest I could not find but, still, knowing the right settings to put in the mount is bound to be better from the off. Ed.

Hey. Another beginner here, I seem to be having a similar issue with my NEQ6. Having polar aligned the mount and returned the scope to the home position I start two star alignment, the first star it goes for is Arcturus but it's miles off, 20-30 degrees. Is this normal? Ed.