|
Hi Russ,
Great advice & documentation from Martin as always. As he says, don't get too pedantic about "perfect" polar alignment, within a few arc-minutes is good enough. In fact, it's often easier for PHD2 if the PA is that tiny bit off anyway. The only thing with PHD2 is to make sure your graph settings use arc-seconds & not pixels. The pixel setting graph will look nice & flat, but it doesn't really tell you much.
As for your stacking question, there are a number of very good free options. Martin suggests DSS which is a great free program and does well. I used to use it all the time, but now I mainly use ASTAP for stacking. It's quite a powerful program but not as well documented as DSS. And the extra tools it provides come in handy. Additionally it's something that I already have installed as a plate solver with my capture software anyway (APT). So it's doing double duty from the start.
Cheers,
Mark
|