My comet is not good

[Fay]

Regarding comet. i have tried to stack in DSS so stars trail, but they dont.

Also. should there be a gap between each sub?

How do you bring out any tail detail?. i am not used to DSLR, have not done it for quite a while.

I did some subs at 120sec, some at 30s and some at 300S, so 3 different stacks, but no trailing going on 

[Carole]

Did you guide on the comet Fay? 
If so are the stars trailing in your individual subs?

If you stack in the normal way it will just align the stars. 

However I found DSS very temperamental in comet stacking, If you went into comet mode and selected each comet head, a lot of the time you could not save as the save icon was greyed out.  Then sometimes it would not let me even select the comet head though nothing wrong with the sub.  Then after laboriously Aligning all the subs the comet tab did not always come up even when I had highlighted a sub or not, and had to keep trying and eventually it would come up.  Then after all this effort it started to stack and then eventually said it was only going to stack one sub.

So I gave up with DSS and stacked manually in photoshop.

I managed to get the comet to stack in Registax with stars trails with the Mono camera, but it could not seem to latch on to the comet head as an alignment point with the DSLR.

All in all a jolly hard task, but it worked just fine in Photoshop manually.

Carole

[Fay]

all those things happened to me Carole! i said I wanted trailing stars but it stacked normally, very tempremental. lot of effort for nothing

[Fay]

I wish I had used a lens now, not ED80

[MarkS]

Fay,

I don't use DSS but I'm sure I've heard there is a comet stacking mode that allows you to click on the comet nucleus in each individual sub-exposure so the software can then stack on the comet head.

Mark

[Fay]

yes i did that, and selected trailing stars method, to no avail

[MarkS]

yes i did that, and selected trailing stars method, to no avail

How frustrating

[The Thing]

I had no problem doing comet stacking in DSS. I used 5 minute exposures at ISO 800 and focal length of 1250mm f6.3 on my 8" scope. As long as you can see the comet head easily and it is different to the stars it should be OK for stacking shorter subs but you may not get a tail. I didn't guide but I have had success when guiding on a star.

If you have a timed sequence of evenly spaced subs then you only have to tell DSS where the comet is in the first and last subs (so says the manual). When I did my 52 sub Lovejoy I defined the comet in each and every sub which seemed to work better. It's easy. Just use the Comet tool, it will recognise the comet head and put a purple circle round it after you click the green Comet icon. Or you can do it manually. You don't need to do it again as the data is stored in the multitudinous .txt files DSS creates.

When you come to stack the Stacking Parameters button will get you to a new Comet tab where you can choose how you want the comet images stacked, star trails, comet trail or both alibgned (twice as long a process).

I would define all the comet positions then check a few subs to get the settings right then do the lot.

[Carole]

there is a comet stacking mode that allows you to click on the comet nucleus in each individual sub-exposure so the software can then stack on the comet head.

That's what I tried to use Mark and see my reply to Fay about the problems I had with it, it is very temperamental.

Carole