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How to stack Seestar Moon video
Your Seestar records hundreds of frames of the Moon in a short clip. Stacking keeps the sharpest ones, lines them up and averages them into one smooth, detailed image.
Updated 25 October 2026
Why stack a video instead of taking a photo?
Air moving above the telescope makes the Moon shimmer, so each video frame is blurred and distorted a little differently. One frame is also noisy, especially in 8-bit video. Averaging hundreds of aligned frames cancels the noise and the random distortions. The result is a 16-bit image smooth enough to sharpen hard and to bring out the Moon's colours without blotches. This is called lucky imaging, and it is how planetary imagers get their sharpest Moons.
The Seestar app can stack the video for you. Stacking it yourself lets you combine several clips from one night, choose how many frames are kept, and get a 16-bit file you can keep editing.
1. Find the video files
Lunar videos are saved on the Seestar's own storage, in the folder MyWorks/Lunar_video. Connect the Seestar to a computer with a USB cable and it appears as a drive. File names start with the date and time, for example 2026-10-21-184344-Lunar-RAW.avi.
- RAW .avi is the sensor data, before any processing. It holds the most detail and is the best choice. It is large: up to about 1 GB per minute.
- .mp4 is compressed. It stacks well too: averaging hides the compression blocks. But it holds less fine detail than RAW.
Don't send the video through WhatsApp, Messenger or similar apps. They shrink and recompress it, and the fine detail is lost before you start. Copy the original file over USB or a file-sharing service that keeps originals.
2. Add the clips
Open AstroSlide and drop the video files on the page, or tap to choose them on a phone or tablet. You can add several clips from the same night: frames from all of them are ranked together, and the rotation of the field between clips (an alt-az mount like the Seestar's turns the image slowly through the night) is corrected.
Large RAW files take a while to upload, so use Wi-Fi rather than mobile data. Up to 3 GB in total per stack.
3. Choose how many frames to keep
Frames to keep starts at 70%. That suits a Seestar: its small 50 mm lens shows little difference between good and bad frames. On real Seestar clips we measured, the sharpest 10% of frames were only 2–4% sharper than the whole clip. Keeping most frames gives the lowest noise. Lower the setting only on nights of obviously unsteady air, when the Moon visibly boils on screen.
Frames where the Moon is cut off at the edge, or dimmed by passing cloud, are always left out.
4. Choose the sharpening
Sharpening at 50% restores the detail the video really holds. It measures the blur on the Moon's edge and reverses it (deconvolution). Higher looks crisper but starts to exaggerate edges. Set it to 0% if you want an unsharpened stack to sharpen yourself in RegiStax, ImPPG or Photoshop.
5. Stack, then edit and save
Stacking takes from a few seconds to a minute or two, depending on the number of frames. The stacked Moon opens in the editor, where you can:
- bring out its mineral colours (see how to make a mineral Moon)
- adjust sharpening, brightness and colour with sliders
- place it among stars from the same night
- save as 16-bit TIFF or PNG, or JPEG for sharing. You can also download the stack before any editing (16-bit FITS for RAW video).
What happens during stacking
- Every frame is checked: is the whole Moon in view, is it dimmed by cloud, and how sharp is it.
- The sharpest frames are kept, ranked across all clips together.
- A reference image is built from the very best frames.
- Each kept frame is aligned to it: first rotation and shift, then the small local distortions caused by the air.
- RAW frames are stacked from their real red, green and blue sensor samples (Bayer drizzle) rather than from interpolated colour, which keeps fine detail.
- The frames are averaged into a 16-bit image, and haze glow around the Moon is removed.
- The stack is sharpened with the blur measured on the Moon's edge.
Problems and fixes
The colours are wrong (green or purple Moon)
The colour pattern of RAW video is detected from the frames. It can't always tell red from blue. Choose a different Colour pattern under the clip list and stack again. Seestar cameras use GRBG.
"No usable frames"
The Moon was cut off at the frame edge in every frame, or not found at all. Keep the whole disk in view when you record.
The stack looks soft
Check the clip first: a soft, low Moon or a hazy night limits what any stacking can recover. Then try more sharpening in the editor. For better clips next time, see how to film the Moon with a Seestar.
Privacy
Your video is uploaded to AstroSlide's server to be stacked. It is deleted as soon as the stack is finished, and the stacked result is deleted after two hours.