Stacking 200 frames by hand taught me patience, now software does it in minutes
Back in 2017 I would manually stack lunar photos from my old Orion scope using Registax, lining up each frame one by one. Took me 4 hours on a Tuesday night for one decent shot of the terminator near Copernicus crater. Now I just run 300 frames through the free AutoStakkert on my laptop and get sharper results in 15 minutes. Anyone else miss the hands-on feel of the old way, or am I just nostalgic for wasted time?
I did the same thing with Jupiter shots around that time. Sitting there with my laptop, dragging alignment points frame by frame in Registax until my eyes crossed. The weird part is I actually learned a ton about how the software picks its alignment points by doing it by hand. When AutoStakkert gives me a bad result now I can usually tell why just from that muscle memory. I still keep Registax installed for the rare night when I want to slow down and really look at each frame.