While this doesn't really qualify as "deep sky" imagery, I've found something interesting to do without a telescope..
I mounted a Samyang 8mm f/2.8 lens onto an ASI178MC camera using a handmade adapter and wrote some C code running on a battery operated Raspberry Pi to take time lapse pictures as twilight fades to darkness and Orion rises over the horizon. The camera software adjusts gain and exposure time to make a smooth transition from day to night. Everything gets recorded on a thumbdrive for later transfer to my laptop for post processing.
More C code on the laptop does frame-by-frame debayering, image stacking, color balancing, brightness stretching, and cropping to standard "HD" format. The 1000+ individual frames are then assembled into a .mp4 video.
And here's the result...
--Derek
