Reply To: Comet image stacking

Forums Comets Comet image stacking Reply To: Comet image stacking

#615707
Nick James
Participant

Hi Alan,

The program isn’t that clever! You need to tell it the X,Y coordinates of a guide star and search radius using “-a x,y,r” (this is used to align the stacks) and then the comet offset rate and image scale using “-o rate,pa,scale”. You can also tell it the image orientation if it is not north up using “-A pa”. Have a look at the autostack script to see how I have automated this. Alternatively you can get all of these things manually. A valid example command line would be:

fcombine -C -N -a 1006,221 -A 1.37 -o 8.86,190.2,5.49 outputfile inputfiles

In this case -N says to normalise all of the input images to the same sky background before stacking, the guide star is at 1006,221 in the image (using the default search radius of 5 pixels). The image PA is 1.37 deg, the image scale is 5.49 arcsec/pix and the comet motion is 8.86 arcsec/min in PA 190.2.

If you just type fcombine with no options it will list the options that it can accept.