Now that's about as far as I got and I haven't thought to much about it until last night. Now when I was taking my test pictures last night the clouds cleared and I could see Ursa Major poking out from behind my house so I thought I'd use that as part of the test. It came out quite clearly and looking at it on this scale you can see the main stars and that's about it.
Today I've been playing around altering exposure, contrast and levels to see what I could see and try to get rid of some of the noise. I then zoomed in to try and see how much of the noise I had gotten rid of. I happened to zoom in on the star Mizar which happens to be a naked eye optical binary and was quite surprised that it seemed to have been captured. I then messed about with the levels a bit more and found that the stars were actually in the right positions and further that I could see objects that I hadn't noticed with the naked eye.
My first attempt got this:
Which is pretty noisy but you can make stuff out on it. I then brought the contrast up quite a bit to take out most of the bright sources:
Which is probably a bit to harsh and got rid of some stuff that was actually there but did at-least get rid of the noise.
Finally I brought the contrast up again and got back some of the noise but probably some objects that are there as well, it's hard to tell.
I'm just really impressed that such a budget camera can capture stuff like this even if it isn't prefect.
