Not stacking Mel111

I had a try, well actually quite a few tries, to stack the Mel111 images from last night. My first two attempts crashed out with Memory errors after they had been processing for some time. I couldn't believe it. I tried again after first shutting everything else down and still the same problem. Now I know the RAW files from the 450d are big at 15Mb each, but this is getting silly. I tried again. This time paying more attention to the settings. I'd found I'd set Drizzle x2 on a previous run and not reset it. This stopped the memory errors. That, however then led onto the next problem. It didn't matter what I did, and believe me I tried, DSS would not stack the images. The best I could get was to subtract the darks from the best image. I thought perhaps it was struggling with the number of stars, and I found a setting to change the star detection threshold. This improved things when registering the images and I got more found, but still only 1 image would stack.

I sought help from AC. The pointers given were helpful, but still the same problem. Although, now DSS was telling me it found loads of stars. There's an option to increase the brightness of the RAW files, I used that, and it certainly sorted that out. In the end, I converted all the RAW files to tif's and ran them through registax in case. This was able to stack them ok, bit I ended up with what looked almost like some form of star trail shot.

I'd known that I had a little trailing in the image, but hadn't realised how badly it was going to upset the stacking programs. Neither of them would do what I was trying to get them to do. I then tried to setup some form of processing to remove the star trails, I couldn't even get this to work on a single image. I have now given up on trying to stack them. The best I can manage is the single frame from yesterday. It's a shame, but there we are. A lesson learnt, without too much pain thankfully. Next time, either the camera will be piggy backed on the NexStar mount or use shorter exposures, or less zoom.