Thanks a lot Ivo & Chris.
I was pretty sure I'd turned off all pre-filtering in my DSLR. I checked back through the settings, and the only ones that *might* have done something unexpected to the data is the white balance (left on auto) and the "High ISO NR" (the options are 'auto' and 'weak' - I left on auto). I did turn off the "Long Exposure NR", so that can't be it. The camera also has the colour options "sRGB" and "AdobeRGB" - I left it on sRGB for want of knowledge on which was better. Nothing else I could see that the camera was doing - all other corrections are definitely off.
I must admit to flying somewhat blind in DSS. I read the manual, FAQ and tech details, and watch some vid tutorials, so I'm okay now at running the program and not making gross errors. However, it remains difficult to know what might be the best register and stacking parameters to use for my RAW data. (I definitely avoided doing any post-processing of the image in DSS, so what you see in the FTS file is straight after the stacking).
Does anyone have advice on what might be decent 'default' parameters for DSS, or else what tweaks are typically highly sensitive or things to avoid? I dug around about in the IIS forums but couldn't find a thread that really covered this (might have missed it). I may well have ticked the RGB color calibration box, for instance! I figure I should work on getting DSS as optimal as possible before I start getting serious about the Startools processing (which is why I hadn't bugged you directly yet, Ivo
). I guess you are saying that I should let DSS do no corrections except those required for stacking - would this include no hot pixel removal etc.?
I did stack via a custom area (I got rid of the margins of the reference image) and junked the worst 14 images that had obvious blurring or got bad scores, but I guess this wasn't sufficient to remove some stacking artifacts.