vpsj

I've read all the comments above but I still can't get DSS to work. The problem is I took all my shots of the comet Neowise using a 300mm lens(untracked). I only have two stars at max in my frame that were near the comet. Because of this, DSS basically refuses to stack my shots with auto-alignment, as it can only see 2-3 stars at max instead of the minimum 8. I even marked the comet in all the frames manually, and selected no alignment mode to stack all of them. That just resulted in a completely gray image, with no comet at all. Can anyone please help me out. Is there a different program that works better on comets? I tried searching for any tutorials on Comet stacking but I can mostly only find DSS based tutorials, and none of them qualify in my case. Please help me. Thank you

I'm trying to stack 240 light frames of Milky Way taken from quite a light polluted area. I tried to stack them in DSS. The Milky Way seems to have been stacked okay, but the surrounding stars look like they've been deliberately dimmed or brushed over. I thought there was something wrong with my frames but when I used the same frames in Sequator, it's working fine. I've attached both the images below, and I have exaggerated them a lot on Lightroom just to see how much details I could pull out. Sequator one seems to have too many weird light bands(?) but I think I can fix them using an adjustment brush. But look at how many stars Sequator is able to show compared to DSS. DSS image: The settings I've tried on DSS and yet nothing changed: 1) Tried in Standard, Mosaic both 2) Tried both Sigma Clipping, and Auto Adaptive Average(These two were recommended by DSS) 3) Hot pixel detection and removal (tried it with enabled and disabled) 4) Nothing enabled in the cosmetics tab 5) Tried with and without Flat frames 6) Star Detection Threshold: Tried from a range of 50 stars to 300 stars. Even manually checked to see if DSS was picking any noise as star(it wasn't). If I try with less than 30 light frames, DSS does an okayish job and the stars in the rest of the image still look like stars, but then the Milky Way has no details to pull out, unless I stack a lot more shots. Can anyone please tell me what am I doing wrong in the case of DSS that it's doing such a poor job for the surrounding stars? If you guys need me to upload some Raw light frames I will do so as well. Any advice and suggestions are welcome. Thank you EXIF info: Camera: Nikon D3100, with 18-55mm kit lens Exposure Settings: F/3.5, ISO 3200, 15s x 240 frames, 18mm focal length, no tracker 50 Darks, 50 Bias and 50 Flat frames. DSS version: 4.2.3