Imaging comets

[Carole]

I had my first "go" ever at trying to image a comet last night.

It was - lets say - a problematic event.  

Even if you take out the silly mistakes I made, like wondering why I couldn't see any stars on the imaging camera and eventually realised I had forgotten to take the lens cap off (duh), and it's so long since I used the DSLR I forgot to use a LP filter my major problems were really those of guiding and stacking due to the comet not appearing to be bright enough,but just to add to my woes, EQMod did not want to connect and so I had to change over to the hand set,

I thought I would use my DSLR to get some colour, and decided to follow Marks example and do 20secs shots and guide on the comet.
Well I guess the biggest problem was the comet was very faint in PHD and even though I increased the gain and length of subs PHD initially would not calibrate and then when it did it kept losing the comet.  

I tried DSS and Registax for stacking but the comet was just too faint to even see it to align, but I did manage to stack it on Astroart albeit only in mono, but the resulting stars are quite faint.

I guess my main question is how to adjust PHD sufficiently so the guiding will work better.

Thanks for your help.

N.B.  l have not done any flats yet so will post up Crap image later.  

Also wondering whether I would do better using the Atik camera rather than the DSLR and use filters for colour.  

Carole

[MarkS]

I didn't manage to guide on the comet - it was too faint to be reliable.

So I guided on a star but stacked on the comet head.

Mark

[Carole]

I didn't manage to guide on the comet - it was too faint to be reliable.

Ah, that makes sense then, thus the reason for the 20 sec subs.

Carole