Hi, I’m after advice on how to get the best Moon images for doing my own stacking and post processing.

I recently got my Dwarf 3 after taking an Astrophotography course last year. I live under Bortle 8/9 skies in London UK so found using a DSL to capture images for stacking and post processing very cumbersome. I spent most of the time trying to find the target and get stars in focus! I thought the automatic rigs looked like cheating but I took the plunge in December and finally received my Dwarf 3 in March. So far it’s been a revelation and worth every penny! My first evening I got a decent shot of Orion, M81 Bode’s Galaxy and the California Nebula. We’ve had a high pressure overhead recently and the skies have been fairly clear so I’ve concentrated on fewer targets but trying to build up sets of decent images to practice my own processing.

More recently I’ve been trying the Moon as a target I thought it might be an easier starting point and was flooding even more light into my polluted skies!

My question to the group is how do I get the best/sharpest images from the Dwarf 3 for stacking and post processing.

So I’ve had the best success with ‘Astro’ images and then used the already stacked FITS image off the Dwarf 3 to do my own work to draw out colours and sharpen detail. I’m using Affinity Photo and following an on-line YouTube tutorial (https://youtu.be/0VloFw1anN8?si=vuV2h0tTrg-digba)

I then tried stacking the image myself in Affinity Photo from the raw FITS data and Darks but like the original ‘lights’ the result was very faint and quite blotchy.

The YouTube demo uses regular photo stacking from TIFF images so I tried taking ‘Burst’ photos and doing the same but I found the results weren’t very sharp.

I’m puzzled why I can’t get a result comparable to the Dwarf 3 stack by stacking the raw images myself but I notice they’re all quite low in brightness as is the final result.

Finally I’m trying a few things from the tutorial to being out colour but don’t get as much depth from the Astro stacked image. I wondered if this could be because of the filtering (the Burst mode imaged I too only used the VIS filter).

The results here are the original Dwarf3 stacked Astro image followed by my post-processing result. I’m pleased with the outcome but feel I’m ‘cheating’ by missing out the stacking step myself.

Any advice from fellow Dwarf3 / Affinity Photo users?

Last night (4am) I woke up and saw the almost full Moon shining bright through my window. Since it's been mostly clouded I quikly attached my Dwarf II to the balcony and went back inside to stack the Moon. I did a calibration and a go-to the Moon, set the binning to off and played around with the exposure settings. It took a while because with 1/200exp and 0gain the Moon was very dim and grainy. But after a while I got a good setting and stacking started. The shotsinfo.json shows that I did 990 shots and 90 stacks, but I only have ±450 fits/raws and I believe I had only 45 stacks (that's what the screen showed me just before the session ended). I mailed Dwarflab about this, maybe they can improve this in a future update. Finally I did a minor postprocessing in Lightroom Mobile with this result.