There was blue skies for a change at sunset this evening so I dragged the gear out and set up expecting (hoping) to have a good clear evening for practicing a few things. Straight out of the gate things didn’t go too well as it took forever (60 min) to repeatedly do the star alignment and polar alignment steps to get the final polar alignment error to a level that I was happy with. By the time I had completed this, the clouds had started. I just had time to frame up the waxing moon and run off a couple videos. Unfortunately I then had some issues with the capture software which for some reason introduced some very fine grid lines onto the video which, while not readily apparent in the video itself, does show up in the final picture and made using wavelets in registax pointless. The final product of the evening was the following.
Update:
After some discussions on the facebook forums it turned out that the issue was that the original footage had not been debayered by the capture software as I had not checked the option in FireCapture. I downloaded the trial version of pixInsight which allowed me to debayer the final stacked image to produce the 3rd image in the sequence above. Learning where the wavelet and finally curves adjustments were enabled the next two adjustments.
