Hi - definitely a newbie and figuring things out as I go. I have a Celestron 6SE (I know it's not an ideal mount), a Macbook Air 2024, a ZWO ASI482MC camera, and for deep sky I have a focal reducer. After a lot of trial/error I'm on the right track for planetary photos but deep sky I'm running into problems mostly because there arent a lot of tutorials and my camera knowledge is rudimentary. Here's kind of what I've been doing for deep sky stuff but all I've successfully done is take black videos.
1) Center image in an eyepiece, up the eyepiece power for centering purposes (I was trying to image Sirius) and then switch to the camera.
2) Fire up ASIImg, turn on the camera and usually I have an out of focus image (I havent tried the parfocal thing yet). Then hit the preview button with an exposure of 10s. Focus, wait 10s or so, hit preview, and repeat. Is that what I need to do? It seems like there could be a better option other than parfocal which might be the right answer.
3) After getting it focused to what looks good to me, I hit the autorun and I let the default autorun go as it is because, well, I don't really know what I'm doing other than I know I need video to stack. The resulting video was empty. I don't get why it would be blank other than the image moved but I don't think it should move that quickly that I'd get a blank image. I get the Celestron mount isnt ideal but I'm pretty good with setting it up with 2 star alignment and I'd think that after getting it focused, it would be right there. Am I wrong?
4) Finally, I know that the histogram is supposed to be like a hill sloping down but honestly, I havent focused on it.
Any tips to get started would be super helpful, plus a tutorial. I attached a copy of Jupiter I took and an obvious unfocused sirius to show you what I've been seeing/doing. Thanks
