My images Wont Align

[Mr_42tr0nomy]

I took a few images of pacman nebula in HA a few days ago and I stacked them. Tonight I was able to get a few images in OIII and I stacked them. Between those two days I guess the orientation of my camera was altered by the slightest bit and the two sets of stacked photos will not align perfectly in photoshop. One side of the image shows nice circular stars and the other side shows double stars.

Is there anyway to correct this? Otherwise I feel like I will be struggling to keep my camera in the exact same place every single time I image and that just seems like a huge pain in the but. There has to be a way to image an object on two separate nights without having to worry about making sure my camera is in the exact same spot it was the night before.... And if I am able to align them in photshop somehow I would like them to be aligned via computer instead of manually so I can ensure that theyre perfectly aligned.

Would love any feedback!!!

Clear Skies. Below I attached the two images (Ha and Oiii). The OIII image is out of focus a tad but the images when aligned in photoshop arent perfect by any means.

[Zakalwe]

Theres lots of ways to do what you are after.

You could manually align them in Photoshop using the Transform tool and using Rotate. This works for images that have the same scale...if you are binning the colour channels then it gets tedious.

You could register the images using Deep Sky Stacker. You load a reference frame in and the align the second stacked image to that. Both images can then be imported into Photoshop and they are aligned.

The best (and more expensive) alternative is Registar. This will align, rotate, scale and register pretty much any series of images regardless of scale orientation, bit-depth. It just gobbles the images up and matches them perfectly.

https://www.aurigaimaging.com/

[carastro]

I use Registar (as Zakalwe suggested), it's a brilliant tool and well worth the money.  

I combine images using different cameras and different telescope, done in different years and works brilliantly to upscale binning too.

Carole 

 

 

[Mr_42tr0nomy]

13 minutes ago, Zakalwe said:

Theres lots of ways to do what you are after.

You could manually align them in Photoshop using the Transform tool and using Rotate. This works for images that have the same scale...if you are binning the colour channels then it gets tedious.

You could register the images using Deep Sky Stacker. You load a reference frame in and the align the second stacked image to that. Both images can then be imported into Photoshop and they are aligned.

The best (and more expensive) alternative is Registar. This will align, rotate, scale and register pretty much any series of images regardless of scale orientation, bit-depth. It just gobbles the images up and matches them perfectly.

https://www.aurigaimaging.com/

Do you think you could elaborate a little more on how to do that in DSS? That seems relatively easier considering I dont have registar. I do have a free trail in Maxim DL. Im not sure if youre familiar with that software but mybe theres some hope there!

[Zakalwe]

Have a look at this tutorial from 21:30 onwards.

 

 

[Zakalwe]

Bear in mind that DSS is sensitive to differences in the subs. if you have changed the camera gain, for example, it won't align them.