Reply To: Comet image stacking

Forums Comets Comet image stacking Reply To: Comet image stacking

#615536
Nick James
Participant

You can provide the image coordinates of the guide star manually or use something like SourceExtractor to select one automatically. I don’t use a Paramount but it tracks the guide star frame by frame so you would need to have pretty awful PE for it to lose lock. The search radius is configurable and if some of the subs are trailed you can set a PSF threshold which is used to reject images from the stack.

As an example of how it can be used the attached script uses fcombine to automatically stack stars and comets. The STAR option is simple. The COMET option is a bit more complex since it uses a local version of astrometry.net to platesolve so that it can get the offsets right.