I really appreciate y'all helping with this ... it's maddening, such a powerful and useful program, foiled at the last second ... sorry for the length of this post also ...
I ran four experiments; one with a simple "one shot focus" of the Orion SSAG, then of the C8300, then using MaximDL of the C8300 using their direct driver, finally one of the C8300 using the ASCOM driver that SGP uses. Each picture was with the lens cap on, in quick succession with as much cruft removed as possible ...
First, the SSAG experiment, there's the logs ...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/6mewgpzroktmd6q/sg_logfile_20161001165509_ssag.txt?dl=0
... this was from this initial condition ...
... and resulted in this image, a nice dark ...
<img src="/uploads/db2508/original/2X/c/c3f7424272aea8aeb14149937002e28b012f8d06.PNG" width="800"
height="557">