I realized what it is about the eclipse image set that makes it so challenging to find and use #astrophotography tools to align them all.
In many cases with astro images, the goal is stacking, i.e., aligning a feature of interest across multiple images where that feature is positioned arbitrarily. In effect, you're "solving" for a single, static variable, and assuming anything that doesn't correlate with it is noise and can be safely eliminated.
With an eclipse, there are two variables that interact with each other: Sol and Luna. There are two features in the images that are dynamically coinciding to make an eclipse, and to properly process the images one must keep track of both objects and their relative positions.
This is a similar issue with processing comet images; the stars and the comet are moving.
I feel like there is an opportunity for someone to make an #astrophotography tool that can handle this "two-variable" case.
I have no idea what it would look like, and I don't have the time or inclination to create such a thing. Just putting it out into the ether because I thought it was interesting.
@malcircuit to get any detail in the comet you need both long exposures and do them with enough total integration, but the comet moves quickly enough that your stars would trail that way.
That’s why you want one stack of just stars (with no comet), e.g. taken next day; and one stack of just comet and no stars.
@thomasfuchs Like I said, I understand that's the most efficient and obviously accurate method. I'm contemplating whether there might be a more sophisticated, computationally intensive way to get similar results from a single set of images.
As in, there's a lot of additional information (the star field as a reference, manually entered position of the comet in the image, the comet ephemeris data, etc) that maybe could be leveraged to tease out the comet image? Just idle speculation.
@malcircuit probably not because you would have to remove the comet to stack just stars; which likely overpowers stars in many areas of the image in subs (it’s basically acting like bad light pollution).
You can still try of course, just stack the subs registered on stars and grab star image from the stack via StarX.
Then remove stars from all subs and stack subs registered on comet.
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