Moon stacked in Affinity Photo

[SB (Chris)]

Just experimenting with shots of the Moon.

Was surprised that it stacked so well in Affinity given that there were no stars evident in the subs. The mount was not polar aligned (just a rough guess as such short exposures).

60 x 0.001 second subs. ASI 183MC, Quattro 800, EQ6-R.

All processed in Affinity photo.

Comments welcome.

Chris

[Averton (P and C)]

Did you stack all of the 60 images or just a percentage of the best ones Chris? We have never used Affinity so don't know it's capabilities for lunar work.

[AstroViking (Steve)]

Hey Chris,

Looks good to me. Nice amounts of detail, and good contrast between the dark and light areas.

How did you avoid the banding that the '183MC gives when taking super short exposures? (My '183MC-Pro gives all manner of awfulness when using anything less than gain 50 or so.)

Cheers,
V

[SB (Chris)]

Hi Steve, Peter and Clare,
I stacked 100% of my images. It took about 60 seconds to stack. I am using Affinity Photo on an M1 Mack Mini.

When I saw your question I chose the option to stack 70% of the images and there was an improvement. It took 50 seconds to stack after the images were analysed which took about 120 Seconds.

Here is an image with 50% of subs stack option. It's sharpened 50% in the Affinity editor.

Steve I use unity gain which is 111 on the 183 MC pro.

Chris

[AstroViking (Steve)]

Thanks, Chris!

[Averton (P and C)]

Originally Posted by SB

Hi Steve, Peter and Clare,
I stacked 100% of my images. It took about 60 seconds to stack. I am using Affinity Photo on an M1 Mack Mini.

When I saw your question I chose the option to stack 70% of the images and there was an improvement. It took 50 seconds to stack after the images were analysed which took about 120 Seconds.

Here is an image with 50% of subs stack option. It's sharpened 50% in the Affinity editor.

Steve I use unity gain which is 111 on the 183 MC pro.

Chris

Yes, the 50% version is definitely an improvement. With the moon we normally only stack a small number of frames (30 or less) and that is normally from 3000+ frames. Unlike DSO work, you don't need to stack images to improve SNR as you have a very bright subject and therefore heaps of signal. This allows you to be very selective and only stack the very best frames. The ones that manage to cut through the atmospheric turbulence. Adding more frames tends to just add blurriness. Having not used Affinity we don't know if it provides a quality graph like AutoStakkert does but this graph can be of assistance in choosing the right number to stack.