Spent 3 hours trying to stack nebula photos and it was the wrong software

I was using DeepSkyStacker for an hour and kept getting garbage results, turns out the free trial version I grabbed had a hidden calibration frame limit. Has anyone else run into software traps that wasted their whole night?

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the_ruby1mo ago

Read a post on CloudyNights last week where a guy said he spent a whole weekend fighting with stacking software before realizing his trial version was silently dropping every fourth frame. That sounds exactly like what happened to you with the calibration frame limit. These free trials are sneaky about stuff like that, they don't announce they're crippled until you're already deep in the workflow. Did you try Siril instead? I heard it's got a steeper learning curve but no hidden paywalls once you figure out the basic commands.