Was this worth the effort?

[Mr niall]

Hello

Following a previous post asking about whether it was worth bothering with an old MFT sensor (which got no replies which was kind of a reply in itself!), I decided to have a go anyway. The biggest caveat here is that I'm not very good at imaging and never really had much success so gave it up a while ago. But decided to have another go with what I had available (which was an omegon minitrack and an elderly MFT with a 14-42 kit lens.).

I pointed it vaguely at Auriga (hoping for m37/38 area but apparently wildly underestimating the width of field of view! Tried a few shots at ISO 800 but the screen was completely washed out so had a go at ISO 400 instead and am now wondering whether I should have stayed at ISO 800.

Anyway - I ended up with 35x60 secs lights, 15x 60 secs darks (no flats as I haven't ever really worked out how to do them well and someone told me not to bother below 50mm anyway, I don't know whether that is correct or not!) at 14mm. The big plus is the tracking seemed ok.

Stacked in DSS, edited in GiMP. I've stretched it but don't really have the skills to go attacking gradients on GIMP, and looking at the crazy vignette may have to look at flats after all. 

But - does this look right? I sort of found the finished result a bit... meh. Its just a bit "screen with white dots". It isn't clipped or blown, and I'm not convinced there is a huge amount more detail to come out of it. Would another 30 light frames bring out a whole lot more detail? I'm not sure. I've got an intervalometer coming in the post so I can hopefully go more than 60 secs but, at the moment I don't really have anywhere I can go in terms of equipment (i.e. I'm stuck with what I've got). 

Is there a way I can get more from my images without having to invest a fortune (also travelling to a dark site isn't really on the cards!)

Banding on the shot - may have to live with that! Very elderly camera!

 

[Craney]

One of those stars could be a newly discovered nova......  you never know    .     If the image looks vaguely recognizable then it's a winner for me......