Tried to stack photos of the moon with a free app, wasted 4 hours

So last week I thought I could get a super crisp moon shot by stacking like 50 frames together using some free stacking software I found online. I spent a good 4 hours shooting, aligning, and processing everything, but the final result looked worse than a single frame from my phone honestly. The app kept misaligning the edges and introducing weird artifacts that looked like digital noise. I even tried tweaking the settings three times and each attempt came out garbage. Turns out cheap stacking tools just can't handle the moon's movement across the sky properly. Has anyone else had better luck with a specific free stacking program or is it just not worth the hassle without paying for something? I'm wondering if my mistake was not using a tracking mount or if the software itself is the problem.

2 comments

2 Comments

ericj459d ago

Wait, you actually spent 4 hours on this? That's honestly insane to me. I tried the exact same thing a couple months ago with a free program called RegiStax and it straight up turned my moon into a blurry mess that looked like a bad watercolor painting. The tracking thing is way more important than people realize though. Even a cheap telescope mount that can track will save you from the headache of the moon drifting out of frame every 30 seconds. I feel your pain man, I wasted a whole Saturday night on that nonsense and ended up with nothing but a folder full of useless jpgs.

jamesf419d ago

Yeah I read an article about this on CloudyNights a while back. Said you basically need 500+ frames to stack before it looks decent. Anything less and you're just making noise. RegiStax is rough for beginners. I tried it once and got the same watercolor effect. Ended up throwing the whole folder away. Funny enough @ericj45 the tracking part is what saved me. Got a $50 motorized mount off Craigslist. Night and day difference. No more chasing the moon around the yard.