Awesome, as usual keep it up

Ah, yes, good point. Good luck Rob

You should be able to point at a bright star and the AF will focus on it, keep very still and the camera will focus. On a tripod is a good way. Also you could pick a point in the distance that is far enough away to get infinity.
Also you don't need to go to a wide aperture or silly high ISO either. I tend to use f5.6 and never go above 800 ISO. You'll get plenty of detail because of the extended exposure time.
No faffing with stacking and dark frames.

All done without the use of a tracking mount the Astrotracer really is that good. I started with the DA*50-135 to get Andromeda in the centre of the frame and then zoomed to 135 and again made sure it was central. Then popped on the DA*300 and took the 30 second exposure, initially when you look at the picture on the back of the screen it is only an orange fuzz but once you let Lightroom at it the full ellipse appears.
The uncropped shot really is uncropped and a single exposure. I did try to do a 10 second shot with the 1.4x TC on but I couldn't see Andromeda in that one because I'd moved the angle of the lens, couldn't find it again and as it was quite late and I had work the following morning and a 1.5 hour drive home I left it for another night.
But when I got the shot home and put it through LR I had only just missed it, there was a large fuzzy lump on the far right of the image so if I'd taken with a much higher ISO I might have seen it and been able to adjust accordingly, Lessons learnt
Oh yes, one more thing. You can actually focus on a bright star with the Pentax K-5iis and K-3 through both lenses mentioned, it's incredible

Oh, just remembered, the Milky Way shot was with an old Pentax A 28mm f2.8. It has the old ability to turn it to infinity and it's at infinity, why aren't modern lenses like that

It's still climbing! At the last count it has over 8200 views

Always, always, always shoot RAW. Never ever allow someone else decide how your finished photos should look, that is what you do if you shoot jpeg and you toss away 95% of the detail captured by your sensor.
Pixel shift takes four images and basically stacks them on top of each other that way every pixel absorbs every colour hence the huge files.

Cheers for the positive comments guys

and another cheeky Milky Way shot




Andromeda and another galaxy above it with the sexy name M32. This is a 30 second single exposure using a DA*300 on my K-5iis at f5.6 ISO 800 and it's uncropped

Cheers again guys

Wow just checked in for the first time since posting this. I'm overwhelmed by everyone's comments.
It has now (18:15 on Sun 28th) had over 4000 views on Flickr after being added, not by me, to a group called "explore".