From: "Alan Friedman" <alan@greatarrow.com>

Date: November 9, 2005 9:24:17 PM MST

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: Camera for guiding

--- In Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com, "Tim" <tjp314@p...> wrote:

I know that some imagers still prefer to choose the 

frames to stack manually... 

The current stacking module in Astro IIDC does a very good job selecting the frames - 

there is little or no advantage to hand selecting. On certain types of subjects (a full frame 

lunar or solar image) and in certain types of seeing (ie when the subject morphs into 

different shapes from turbulence) there can be an advantage to manually selecting the 

region that is used for alignment and saving multiple stacks aligned at different points for 

later assembly in a program like photoshop. But as you say, Tim - doing any of this in 

Keith's IS will take a much longer time for a (sometimes) marginal improvement. 

Here is a recent image taken in poor seeing and stacked in Astro IIDC:

http://www.geocities.com/alanfgag/saturn_103005.jpg

The image is nasty - grainy and over processed - but I did take the time to compare the 

automated Astro IIDC stacking with hand selection in KIS. The detail was identical either 

way. Oddly, the KIS stacks (saved as 8 bit pict images) had a noisey interference pattern 

which was very difficult to deal with - this did not occur in the stacks from Astro IIDC 

which were saved as 16bit Tiff images. 

best,

Alan