My DSi questions--?????

Do I have to take darks every time I go to image.
Or are they stored for use after, so I can skip that step after it takes the ones its doing now.

When you do 'take darks' store them in a folder for a given temperature. When you next image, point envisage to the approriate folder - no need to retake them each time...

HTH

Dave

Thanks Dave,
Ok, how come every 3 frames or so that pops up on the screen I get a big white pixellted one, and it takes ages to go away.
Ive been out here 3 hours and I havent got anything yet.

I'm having trouble myself with new software update...

Right, heres anaccount of my 1st night out with the Dsi.
I 2 star aligned my Etx70, and had it very well aligned.
I faced The Orion Nebula (as you do ).
I left it to take darks, which should have taken 8.5 minutes, but when I checked after 4 minutes a window had popped up saying 'xfer failed on 5 images'. This box came up 3 times over 18 minutes, so I aborted the dark frame taking (4 were saved).
I proceeded to get a live image, and it took, and im not joking, 2 hours to focus it, and still all i got were blobs for stars and some nebulosity. Im not sure whether the stars are supposed to be pinpoint on the laptop screen even.. , but the closest i got was circular blobs for stars. Anyway, i went for 15 second exposures, and hit 'start'. Over the course of 370 seconds, 9 frames were taken.
I have them on the laptop, so ill find a way of putting them up here soon.
I think job 1 is to parfocalise the Dsi with a 25mm MA EP i have, that should put me near enough to focus.
But I enjoyed, all the tweaking and seeing it on the screen, its great to do it, just need more experience with the whole setup.

That's the same error I've been getting... Is your laptop USB1.1? If so, that could be the issue. Meade recommend USB2.

The parfocal route is a good one - it'll save a bit of time. But bewar, on the ETX70, the smallest rotation of the (already small) focus knob will make a difference. And by small I mean the smallest fraction the know will turn! 2 Hours to focus? That's short for a newbie!!! I think it took me 3 hours first time round...

A focus hint - focus on the moon if you can - its easy to know if you're in focus or not and the moon is easy to find. An alternative is to use the Gallilean moons if Jupiter is kicking around. Otherwise, usea bright star then a dim star. On the dim stars, I'd crank up the contrast to 2 or even 3 - you'll see out of focus donoughts easier. Then for fine focus, decreas contrast but increase the exposure time.

For now, I'd not worry about the darks until you're more familiar with the peculiarities of the software. Also, I set the quality and image count to zero nd 1 respectively. I don't trust the Meade quality algorithm and would rather choose which frames to chuck out myself.

Do you image in jpg or fits?