I'm not going to get to take Moon shots tonight, it's getting too late and some clouds moved in around 10pm that haven't cleared off completely yet. If I was going to do it like I have in the past... take a series of shots and select the one with the best overall focus... it'd be one thing. This time my plans are to take about 100 shots, pre-align and crop them, then switch to another program to select the best and stack them so it produces a sharper image.
All of the photos will actually be taken with the same focus, one I've selected previously as the sharpest I can get it at. The trouble is that the air distorts the images unevenly. Stacking looks at each pixel that was previously aligned together and takes the average of all of them which basically corrects for most all of the distortions. Sort of keeping the good parts of each picture and throwing out the bad ones to create a new one with only the good pixels in it.
The only remaining work is to tweak the final exposure and contrast and some intelligent sharpening to tease out the fine details. The fun part will be learning the two new programs I've installed earlier tonight.
All of the photos will actually be taken with the same focus, one I've selected previously as the sharpest I can get it at. The trouble is that the air distorts the images unevenly. Stacking looks at each pixel that was previously aligned together and takes the average of all of them which basically corrects for most all of the distortions. Sort of keeping the good parts of each picture and throwing out the bad ones to create a new one with only the good pixels in it.
The only remaining work is to tweak the final exposure and contrast and some intelligent sharpening to tease out the fine details. The fun part will be learning the two new programs I've installed earlier tonight.
