Microsoft ICE stopped working

[Macavity]

Doubtless of general use, but I sense SOLAR Astronomers
make more use Microsoft ICE... for assembling Mosiacs?

It actually seems to have a good reputation. Better than 
e.g. many a commercial offering for image stitching....
A while since I even TESTED it, but Microsoft ICE 2.0.3 (64bit) 
on Win 7 now seems not to even *start up* anymore! 

This reported elsewhere too, but with no real answer,
even from Microsoft. No ERROR messages - It does
seems to write a "report file", but nothing obvious.
 

 

[Pete Presland]

I use ICE or Autostitch, have you tried a reinstall for ICE. Autostitch does give good results as well, recently it has been stitching my mosaics when ICE has failed to.

[Macavity]

Thank for that... Sadly, try as I might, ICE still seems dead!

But I found some references to iMerge here and tried that...
I rather like the style of interaction. Certainly easier than
doing it "manually" via GIMP etc. Not perfect, but it works!

P.S. You can "see the join" but I was able to incorporate
a generalised FLAT in each of the component quadrants etc.
Having FLATTENED the life out of it...I even used an *IRIS*
artificial Sun on this one to recover the final disk intensity!