John Frattura
Spiral Galaxy M81 in Ursa Major
This image is a combination of image data taken a few nights last week, with image data that I had collected last year.
I don't use a stacking program for images taken though my telescope. Instead, I push the brightness and contrast of every image, and carefully align them by hand, and stack them as layers in Paint Shop Pro. I save them in stacks of 10, and then stack the 10s the same way.
I also don't use dark frames or flat frames or any other frames other than the images themselves.
When it comes to guiding, I do that by hand too. I stick a QHY camera down an off-axis guider tube and run that video into a laptop. Then I bring up either Sharpcap or NINA, and put a bullseye overlay over the video. Then I watch which way the guide star drifts, and push buttons on my hand controller. So now i can take longer exposures, and it seems to work just fine, as all of my 200 second images had nice round stars.
Spiral Galaxy M81 in Ursa Major
This image is a combination of image data taken a few nights last week, with image data that I had collected last year.
I don't use a stacking program for images taken though my telescope. Instead, I push the brightness and contrast of every image, and carefully align them by hand, and stack them as layers in Paint Shop Pro. I save them in stacks of 10, and then stack the 10s the same way.
I also don't use dark frames or flat frames or any other frames other than the images themselves.
When it comes to guiding, I do that by hand too. I stick a QHY camera down an off-axis guider tube and run that video into a laptop. Then I bring up either Sharpcap or NINA, and put a bullseye overlay over the video. Then I watch which way the guide star drifts, and push buttons on my hand controller. So now i can take longer exposures, and it seems to work just fine, as all of my 200 second images had nice round stars.