Hi Alan,
Here is a video frame of its neighbour, NGC 869, taken with the same gear, same exposure
I participate in pro-am projects to record occultation events and for astrometry of NEOs. I need accurate timings, so my timestamps are provided by a 1PPS GPS video time inserter. My current model is the IOTA-VTI Basic. Another popular VTI is GPSBOXSPRITE3. They don’t offer the user an option to add text to the video stream. Some enthusiast have built their own VTIs and added this feature.
You don’t need such timing accuracies for photometry, and with your background you could consider options such as this Arduino Project where you could look at adding text to its timestamps. A Raspberry Pi time server is another option.
Cheers,
Alex.