From: "Eric" <eddot1103a@mindspring.com>

Date: July 23, 2006 11:50:04 AM MDT

To: <Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com>

Subject: stacking and histogram questions

Hi,

During my laborious processing of various streams, I notice that IIDC sometimes doesn't stack all of the frames I originally picked.  This has happened for both lunar and planetary sessions.  I noticed with Jupiter that I had to prealign in KIS first before IIDC would accept all of my hand picked frames.  With the moon, if I try prealigning first, in IIDC it doesn't align them well at all presumably because KIS allows the black edges to remain if it realigns a frame.  Is there anything I can do in IIDC to get all hand picked frames stacked?  I've had confidence at 0 (because they are hand picked) and I have tried various matching, but still a certain number of frames are excluded. 

I'd appreciate any histogram suggestions.  Maybe because my monitor was incorrectly adjusted, not sure, but a lot of what I captured recently came out with very low gains, to the point where I have to significantly adjust the histogram of the final stack.  During capture, I had the histogram enabled and adjusted gain until the curve was "pure" without jagged lines.  If I continued to increase gain, I would get a jagged histogram but not saturated.  Can I risk running the gain where the histogram shows jagged lines and what do the jagged lines (within the histogram curve itself) indicate?  Not talking about saturation here, just an "impure" looking histogram during capture. 

Sorry for the long questions, but appreciate in advance any suggestions for the above. 

Thanks,

Eric