It looks like when optics are not fully corrected and thus subs are affected by optical aberrations, PI's star registration with distortion correction appears to be a tool of choice, as it seems to attempt to locally adapt registration to account for various degrees of star distortions across the entire image.
Maybe for the benefit of all, we could create a list of other platforms that can do a similar type of registration (not simply rotating/shifting/uniformly scaling the entire image)
