Ben Benson

Hi, Last night I spent just over an hour imaging Sadr, in Cygnus. I managed to get about 50 minutes of total exposure time, taking 10 darks and 220x 15 sec exposures. It was nearly a full moon, which probably didn't help, but all I managed to get was this: Having spent a while out in the cold making sure everything was tracking and imaging correctly, I'm a little (very) disappointed. I've been doing astrophotography since November, using a 100mm lens and I now have a Skywatcher 50ED 250mm APO Refractor, which I would have thought should give me some nice wide field images? The camera I'm using is the Raspberry Pi HQ Camera. I know it's far off being a perfect astrophotography camera, but I've got some decent images, with the horsehead and flame nebula being the best to date, which I only spend 40 minutes or so on (see attached). My main question is, what do I need to get some decent results? I'm imagining that the camera is the main downfall, but I've spent most of my budget, and I definitely cannot buy a new DSLR or camera - an old second hand one could be justified however. Or am I just not spending enough time on targets - is 50 minutes under a full moon, with 15 second exposures ever going to yield good results? I did also image the flame nebula with a focal reducer, I have not been using that recently, will this change much, other than the view? Thanks