Hi Craig,QuoteCorrecting stars affected by tracking errorSolutions of the 'correct the stars' kind fall in the painting/retouching category. We are not interested in these. This is astrophotography, not artistic/general photography, and hence retouching tricks are excluded from the game.As Carlos has pointed out, the only valid solutions to this problem are those that act on the whole image, including deconvolution and other global optimization techniques. There are different types of tracking errors; basically constant/linear errors, field rotation errors, and accidental tracking errors. Some of them can be treated, some cannot.However, even if you can 'fix' wrongly tracked frames with deconvolution, the resulting data will always be poor data. No software solution can return a wrongly tracked image to the state it would have if acquired with perfect tracking because we are dealing with discrete, noisy and band-limited signals.So the only solution to tracking problems is fixing the hardware that is causing them: throw away all wrongly tracked frames, look for the causes of bad tracking in your equipment, analyze and understand them, and fix them. Then acquire the data again. Astrophotography requires the pursuit of excellence, both technically and aesthetically. No software 'magical box' can help you to achieve that.
Correcting stars affected by tracking error
