Stacking the moon

[Guest]

Last night I took 115 pictures of the moon using my SW 200PDS with a canon EOS450D and a x2 barlow lens. The pictures were stored raw.

I processed it with PIPP first and I used that to select a wide strip down the terminator. The output was a set of TIFFs which was the input to autostakkert 6.2 which did the stacking.  (I have tried outputting an AVI from PIPP but when I input that to AS it hangs and eventually reports an out of memory error). Everything seemed to go ok but the final image didn't look any better than any of the individual subs. In fact it looked slightly worse. There seemed to be more detail in the original subs.

Should I expect the stacked image to look better that the original subs or am I being unrealistic with only 115 subs? In fact I only used half of those because I set AS to use the best 50% of the subs.

In the past I have stacked pictures of the whole moon using the same method and the stacked image has looked better ( although not a lot). In this case the image was only a section of the moon because of the barlow. PIPP and AS were set to surface feature rather than disc.

I'd be grateful for any suggestions. I'm fairly new to image processing and have been using various youtube videos as my guide.

Cheers

Steve

 

[ebdons]

 Make sure that your focus is sound and locked when using the barlow x2, single images should be worse than the stacked end result unless the settings are wrong, I have used autostackkert in the past but mainly use registax which never fails to stack my lunar and planetary images correctly. but it may be that AS likes more subs than 115 and try and use the ser/avg file setting as I found that works ok. have you removed that version of AS and downloaded the new one? as that has been known to work ok. also it maybe the canon file format is corrupted? or I have found that a file converter is also a good utility to have. ton

[CraigT82]

Stacking doesn't give you sharper images per se, but the stacked image has a much greater signal to noise ratio, which them allows you to sharpen it more than the single sub.

What are you using to sharpen the stacked image? Have you compared a sharpened stack against a sharpened single sub? 

In AS, how many alignment pointsare you using. Posting examples of your images is always good! 

[happy-kat]

Registax has excellent sharpening abilities try it on your Moon image as I think you can work on the single image.

[Guest]

Thanks,

The subs I've got look OK to me. I have used the sharpening features of registax before and although I don't quite know how it works I have been able to make pictures appear sharper. In fact I can sharpen the stacked image of the moon this time using registax and it does look better but I figured it must be an illusion if the original is poor quality. I must admit I'm not too clear on what sharpening does. I thought it seemed bit of a cheat as if you could make a poor picture look better than it really is. 

Anyway I've attached two pictures here.The first one is the stacked image and the second one is one of the original subs. Neither have been sharpened.