Noob needs some help
Stacking program, astrometric (plate) solver, fits file viewer
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So last night, for the first time I was able to capture some images of a planet - Jupiter, prominent in the eastern sky even though my area is quite light-polluted and it was a full moon. My equipment is really on the weak side - Celestron Nexstar 4se and Svbony-305. In particular, the 4se only offers manual focus and getting a really clear focus was not possible. Possibly dew was a problem, but I don't think a big one. Temperature was 80 degrees Farenheit and humidity not too bad. I have a dew shield on order, but don't have it yet. Nonetheless, I captured a few images, some of which are recognizable as Jupiter, others just as a white blob. I captured a series of 6 images. I can see I made some mistakes - I captured only "light" images were captured, no "darks" or "flats".
I tried to stack these images. The result was worse than any of the individual images. There are so many parameters, I didn't know which way to go. (see topic title - "noob"), and from the log, I can see that only the first picture was used, so I don't really understand why that would be worse than the stack.
So here are my questions:
1) not sure why the images seem to jump around as they do. Certainly, the ground was stable. Terrain was a concrete platform above a local beach. Is the jumpiness why they can't be used?
2) Are there any tricks/settings I could try in ASCAP to improve the stacking process with these images?
3) Is it possible to pull color out of these images?
4) What are some things I should try so next time will be better?