First Stacking Attempt

[DanLXIX]

The clouds parted for a while, so I ran outside with my camera to have a bash at stacking.

My first attempt at using Registax, and I also tried out DSLRController on my Nexus 7 tablet as well, just to make the learning curve a bit steeper.

I made a lot of mistakes, but I ended up with this from 29 photos taken with my Nikon D7100 and Sigma 120-400mm lens at 400mm.

Comments most welcome

[Langy]

Closer look it seriously looks 3D. I think maybe too much effect of some sort gone in there, maybe too much sharpening.

Someone with better knowledge will say I'm sure, but a good first attempt.

Keep them coming and show us all.

[rkc]

If my first attempt at stacking the moon is anywhere near as good as this, I'll be delighted. Or my second, or my third, or...

[red dwalf]

some nice colour in the seas, may be alittle over exposed in registax, but a lovely first effort,

well done

[DanLXIX]

some nice colour in the seas, may be alittle over exposed in registax, but a lovely first effort,

well done

I think that might be down to me messing up the exposure when I was taking the shots, because the android app thought the camera was in a different mode than it actually was,  so the exposure was a little higher than I had planned.

Having said that, it might be Registax - not that I'd know what I did, if it is 

[Eddy_]

I agree that it looks over sharpened, but a very nice shot regardless.

[DanLXIX]

I agree that it looks over sharpened, but a very nice shot regardless.

I've had several attempts at redoing this, but I can't get Registax to stack anything other than a very blurred image. I'm not sure what I did to get the decent stack, but it seems to be a fluke at the moment. Any clues?

[DanLXIX]

Well I made some small steps forward.

I originally cropped the photos down in Lightroom, and the final TIFF's had the moon jumping around a lot in the frame which I think was giving me the blurring problem. I then tried the cropping in PIPP which helped, but still didn't remove the ghosting and blurring until I used 'align by centre of gravity', which seemed to do the trick. I then was more gentle with the wavelet processing, although I still haven't got my head around this fully yet, because only 1 & 2 seem to do anything in the image.

Anyway, I got this out of it, which I've finished off in Photoshop (to remove the cyan halo) and then tweaked in Lightroom.

Question is, is this a step forward or backwards?

[Langy]

I would say it looks more natural. Below was my first attempt with the WebCam where the craters at the edge are well defined, mine still looks a little too much and the rest seems to be a little out of focus. I still need to sort out the colouring on mine. Where yours looks far better.

A much better updated image. I know myself from last night it's too easy to leave the levels too high on the wavelets as you suddenly see more parts defined, the trouble is that the other parts that were well defined before then go over the top. I think the key thing is that the real details will only come near to the shadow line where the sunlight is hitting it from the side, where the rest has more of a frontal view of the sun and less detail will be visible.

I think we both have a lot to learn, lots more images and lots more stacking. Great fun though.

Thanks for the update.