My first camera is/was a Microsoft Lifecam HD. Works with a few modifications in a big dob surprisingly well. The "real" camera is the older version of this camera that I got for $200 on a whim. Those SBIG cameras are amazing, and I'd like to get one, but at a starting price of $2K, then you need a filter wheel, then a decent astrograph to drive the thing I have to stick with what I got for now and learn the processing and setup. I may go back to that Jupiter and process it with drizzling to make it a bit larger. The raw .tiff is 40mb and when you enlarge it you can really see some detail.
What a sad night. The seeing was great, too. The new laptop is here and Windows 10 can go fuck itself with a cactus. Camera has been beaten into driver compliance, looks like the software will work, and started the calibration frames so that is done and over with. This is about all I can get out of 4is hours of frustration. That I got anything at all is more a testament to my "Never give up, never surrender" stubborn streak than anything else. I really, really need to work on my GIMP and post-processing skills.
GIMP=My broke ass just bought hardware and there is nothing left in the cash drawer for software. I think that I am going to drop the $100 on Nebulosity which is built from the ground up for astrophotography. Looks like Lightroom 6 is $150 on Amazon so after everything settles down I'll get something.
I did a work-study stint writing image processing scripts for the astronomy department as a student, and they seemed to do all their image processing programmatically. They favored IDL, but could live with me doing it in Python. Maybe that was a different thing though, all they told me was "there are stars and planets and stuff in all this noise. Make the noise go away, keep the stars. How will you know the difference? Uh, ask someone."
Me? I might rack up some shots and then go play with the good stuff.
The new laptop is already paying dividends. I can now capture in RAW 16 bit colour at 20FPS. I did not notice until I uploaded it to Imgur that the two moons in the frame managed to make it through processing! They are dim dots off to the right if you blow that image up. No GRS tonight, no transits, but all in all pretty cool. Gonna try for a very early Sunday and get Saturn and Mars for the first time of the year.