Because Registax in particular, and astronomy imaging in general, does an
alignment procedure because telescopes do not exactly and perfectly track an
object, due to several factors. So unless the individual frames are aligned
before stacking, you wind up with a blurred planet.

For what you want to do, just use the arithmetic feature on Photoshop or Paint
Shop Pro and add the images one at a time, or in batch mode (although I've not
tried the latter). Registax was designed for a specific case, astronomical
imaging. For that, Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro would be the hard way to do it,
when you're stacking hundreds or thousands of images.

--- Dave
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Pinprick holes in a colorless sky
Let inspired figures of light pass by
The Mighty Light of ten thousand suns
Challenges infinity, and is soon gone




"Steve Irwin" wrote in message
...
Hi all,

I'm *extremely* new to astrophotography, and appologies for what may be an
off-topic question.

For my studies I am required to take a series of photographs of flames and get
an average. A bit of hunting around on the net lead me to discover
astrophotography. Very different subject matter, but similar process. The
photos I saw blew me away, so I started taking some shots.

I tried to use "Registax" to stack my images (both of flames and the sky), but
am having troubles with the "align" process. If I'm taking shots of flames, or
the sky at night (eg just the clouds) without a telescope then there aren't
any particular features I want to align to. I want to be able to stack the
images, but without aligning them to a particular feature. Sure, if I had a
really high powered scope, or I wanted to track something moving then I
understand why it would be necessary, but otherwise, could someone please
explain to me why I have to align the images, and why can't I just overlap the
images directly on top of one-another?

Is there other software out there that would do what I want? I've tried
downloading Astrostack, but kept getting Java errors, although this doesn't
seem to do what I want anyway.

Cheers,
Steve