[MrB (Simon)]

Hi Neil,
I also purchased AAv5 based on Ken's posts, also on images on IIS by Mike Sidonio (Strongmanmike) and my own experience with the trial version.

I am an absolute newbie when it comes to image processing(still in the dark!) and have only scratched the surface of AA's capabilities as far as that is concerned, but when it comes to aligning and stacking frames, AAv5 wins hands down and is worth the purchase price for that alone.

I have tried the most well known software out there for stacking and AA is an absolute bullet!
I recently aligned and stacked 36x 18megapixel RAW subs (Canon 60Da) and it was all done in 5 mins on an old, and I mean old(2007), Core2Duo laptop.
By contrast, PixInsight and DSS(Deep Sky Stacker) would not let me stack any more than 3 subs before going into meltdown with 'Out of Memory' errors.
On my work laptop (16GB memory, SSD and i7-3610QM) PixInsight was able to stack all 36 but was very slow.

Out of interest, AAv5 was even able to stack all 36 subs on my little 11" netbook (similar to an Eeepc) that I use in the field for scope control, with no drama's at all! Due to the teeny-weeny CPU (AMD E450 APU actually) it took about 30mins, but I suspect any other software would have flat-out refused to do it.

I have also used the manual align feature while stacking ~30 subs of Comet Lemmon, and it was a pleasure rather than a chore.
Drop luminance right down to make the comets coma as faint as possible and bring out the nucleus, use the arrow keys to move the centroid, hit enter and the next sub loads, move the centroid with arrow keys again, hit enter, next sub loads.... done in no time at all.

Don't get me wrong, the other software is obviously capable, but from my experience of aligning and stacking alone, AA is a clear winner.
As I get more experience under the belt, I will more than likely also purchase PixInsight for it's processing power, but suspect I will continue to use AA for stacking.