Aligning and Stacking DSOs

[RichJGould]

Hi all,

I am new to DSO astrophotography and am hoping for some advice.

I recently took around 70 frames of M57, with varying exposure lengths (between 10-20sec).

Unfortunately, polar alignment was not perfect and although each frame appeared resonably still, I sacrificed some frames to get the target back in the middle of the camera.

K3CCDtools saved the images as an .avi. Watching it back there is noticable drift between shots.

I know this is not ideal, and it is not the right time of year, but I was still hoping that I could find a way of aligning these frames.

I first tried K3CCDtools but it just doesn't seem to align at all, even when I choose to manually pick alignment points, it just produced an image that showed the drift.

I exported as individual .bmp files and put into DeepSkyStacker, but as it cannot find any stars, that fails.

Is there a way, with these programs or another, to manually choose the align points of each frame, and allow me to compensate for the drift?

As an example of the individual frames I've got, attached is K3CCDs stacked image.

8" Reflector on motorised EQ-5

SPC900NC SC1 modified webcam

thanks for your help,

Richard

[ollypenrice]

I stack in AstroArt and that has a simple and reliable manual stacking option.

I'm sure others do as well but that's the one I use. You just click on the same star each time.

Olly

ollypenrice's Photos