Newbie puzzlement

[cjdawson]

Oh one more thing, if you are not already, Shoot in RAW!

[JOC]

cjdawson, for a long time now I have shot in dual formats just in case I got anything good enough to do some HD style processing.  So far I've never found anything productive to do with the .CR2 files (which I think are the RAW ones) and have periodically deleted them as they take up some considerable amount of space wherever I store them.  I posted the .JPG's of the moon as I don't know how this site is for posting large file size images and assumed that a reduced size JPEG was best for a quick show of what I'd got, but even for that shot I had the CR2 image.  I've looked online and it says that CR2 stands for Canon Raw Version 2 Image so that goes along with my assumption that it was the RAW file format.  In any event those are the images that I intend to feed the bit of software when I'm ready for you to tell me what to do with them so I do hope that all sounds correct!!  :-D  Many thanks 

[cjdawson]

Yep, you got it in one.   The .CR2 files are the raw images, rather than a compressed version, and yes they're huge and not suitable for posting on the web.   What they contain is alot more detail about the image so when you start taking multiple shots and stacking them these are the files that you need to use.  It's that fine detail that we're trying to get too with the stacking techniques.

If you were to start with jpg's, it's like cutting your arm off before you begin.  Just isn't going to let you do a handstand ;-)    Using the .cr2 files and feeding them into a program like Deep Sky Stacker (this is free stacking software) it will  align, combine the images producing what should be a noise reduced version as a TIFF file.  You then open this TIFF File in PhotoShop, Gimp or something similar and stretch the histogram to bring out that fine detail.  This step is hope you make the image bright and pleasant to look at.

[JOC]

OK, I've taken some exposures - I don't think they will amount to much, far too much dew around and its ruined what I can see.  I did have a slight issue - when I took the view of the moon earlier in this thread I was able to open the shutter and get good focus as the moon filled the frame and was bright enough to focus on.  What do you do to focus on the stars?  I opened the shutter but couldn't do the focus through the TTL focussing because the stars were not bright enough to see individually - ergo I had no way of knowing if they were in focus.

Anyhow with some CR2 files I can at least have an experiment with the software so although I don't think a final image will be any more than a smudgy blob, if you can tell me what I should do with the CR2 files I'll run the process just so as I know what to do when I get some better ones.