Help! I'm new to this!

[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.

[bosun21]

For the planets you actually want to take short videos of 60-120 seconds with an exposure of between 5-12 ms. Also try and use a smaller region of interest to increase the frame rate although with the manual scope you will need a larger ROI. You can also adjust the gain until you get a decent image on the screen. Capture the video in a SER file of which you can take multiple. Once you have the SER files you need another piece of software called Autostakkert III which will stack the thousands of the best separate images into a single image. Then you want to use the software called Registax to sharpen the final image. This is a rough description of the process and I would advise you to watch some videos on YouTube regarding the software I've mentioned. You definitely don't want to use a reducer on the planets, a barlow on the other hand yes. Good luck.

Edited January 3 by bosun21

[Owmuchonomy]

As above and for imaging the planets you also need loads of focal length.  For the ASI224 camera you need to be around f/15 so use a barlow or similar to get close to that.  Preferably, several metres of focal length is the way to go.  For example, with my SCT 9.25" I am imaging planets at around 4.5 metres of focal length and f/20.