Hated my old stacking method for astrophotos until I tried something simple

I used to just stack my moon shots in Registax and call it done, but I always got this weird blurry edge. Then about 3 months ago I watched a tutorial that said to manually align each frame in Photoshop instead of letting software auto-stack. On my last full moon capture I did 40 frames by hand and the difference in sharpness was night and day. Anybody else had better luck with manual alignment over stacking programs?

3 comments

3 Comments

aaron_perry3h ago

And honestly I used to think manual alignment was a waste of time but you just proved me wrong. I tried it on a stack of Saturn frames last week and the detail came out way cleaner than anything AutoStakkart gave me. It takes longer but the results speak for themselves, right?

ben_lewis3h ago

Right? I tell people that all the time and they look at me like I’ve got three heads. Spent three hours on a single Jupiter capture a few months back doing manual alignment because the seeing was just okay, and the final stack was way sharper than anything the auto tools spit out. You can really see the band detail pop when you pick your frames by hand instead of letting the software guess.

jana8811h ago

Oh man that reminds me, I spent a whole night once trying to get a good shot of the moon through some thin clouds. Woke up the next morning and realized I left the camera running for like four hours by accident. Ended up with this weirdly cool timelapse of clouds drifting over the surface, and the frames where the clouds thinned out were actually clearer than anything I've ever gotten on a totally clear night. Sometimes the best results come from the biggest mistakes you know?