J McBride wrote:
I went and took all the good data I had of M42 since going digital and put
them together to see what I would get. The scopes used were 8"f/4 newt and
a 4" tak refractor f6 and f/8. Deepsky stacker didn't like them so I
manually put them together in Picture Window. It looks like the one corner
didn't regester very well either. I don't know the total time but I am
guessing 1 hour. It is very cloudy here in MI so one has to come with ways
of spending the cloudy nights doing something other then dreaming or
waiting.

Joe

That's a heck of a lot of work to do manually. I've tried a couple
times just to adjust for images taken years apart with the same scope
but different camera positions and temperatures. I failed miserably.
Only program I've found that can handle this is Registar. Not cheap for
one or two images but it does in seconds what I failed at in hours. For
a free program DSS is a very good program, it just can't handle this
situation as you found out. Even images with various edge distortions
will match fine in Registar. It seems to push and pull the image around
until it matches. You set the image you want to define the field and
the others will be adjusted to match. Not a user friendly interface. I
find it confusing and often go astry since I rarely use it. That needs
redoing but once figured out it is very powerful.

Your manual results are far better than mine however.

That's an interesting project. I'd not have the patience. You must
have as many clouds as I do to spend all that time on it.

Rick


--
Correct domain name is arvig and it is net not com. Prefix is correct.
Third character is a zero rather than a capital "Oh".