[Jeffkop (Jeff)]

Hi again to everyone.

I recently posted a couple of images M17 & M5 to be specific and it was unanimously agreed they needed more data. I have also understood this imaging process to be a long term thing where one gathers new data to be added to images every year perhaps as the celestial objects present themselves in your part of the sky. It wasnt until I tried to reimage M17 on a subsequent night that the complexity of this process was revealed.

I can get the camera very close to the SAME position it was when I took the first lot of images but NOT exact and so, when I try to align the new data with the old data ... well I cant successfully can I. The alignment process will only try and move the pic in UP/DOWN, RIGHT/LEFT when infact they need to be rotated a little to do the job.

So either everybody leaves the camera in the same position and never remove it from the scope OR is their software available that can rotate images to align them??

Otherwise how do you all take images year after year and add them together??

I'm hoping there is an easy answer to this.

Thanks for looking

Jeff