Hi!
I was comparing RS4 with AS about a year ago. I'm doing lunar imaging and H-alpha solar images most of the time. On both, AS just works better in my opinion, regardless of focal length and seeing. The results are free of distortion and have less noise after sharpening.
I'm rarely doing planetary imaging, but I heard that for planets, AS does not work better. Most planetary imagers are using RS, and they should have a reason for this.
On solar prominences, I'm also using AS because of the distortion argument (I need distortion free images for animations -
click). There are some issues with AS not finding its reference points on prominence videos, but if you're setting them manually, I found the results better than with RS, especially under bad seeing conditions.
I personally think that it's worth the time to learn the ropes of avistack. I found the original documentation to be a very good starter as well as a good reference later on.
Michael
