Freebie computer photo processing programs

[cid]

So I'm becoming a bit of a dab hand with this digital camera my little brother gave me, and it's getting to the point that
I'm going to try some thru-the-eyepiece astro photography.
I need some processing software. I am a full time college student, so payment in anything other than pocket lint is unlikely.
I'm specifically interested in software that would let me take jpg's and stack them. I know there's some color processing software
in Windows that I can use first go-round to get all the colors/highlights/whatnots equalized. It's the stacking software that
I'm interested in now.

Anyone got any ideas?

[FZR1KG]

http://rogergroom.com/astronomy-resourc ... -software/

I was going to do some stacking a while ago but life got in the way and it never eventuated.
There is a ton of free stuff out there that will do what you want but you'll have to get your film scanned with as high a bit depth as possible and use a compressionless format or you'll defeat the whole point of stacking. IOW, jpeg for example will introduce its own artifacts but the point of stacking is to eliminate artifacts and enhance the image. It'll still work, just no where near as good.

[cid]

For the moment, jpegeseses is all I got. Eventually I'm considering a camera upgrade that will give me different formats, but for now...
I'll start out with just a few (10?) to learn how it's done. After that, I can up the total.
The pix will be most likely of various phases of the moon. If I come up with something decent, I'll be sure to post it here.

[FZR1KG]

Pics of the moon will work out fine with Jpegs.
I was thinking you were going to image DSO's.

Usually with the moon and a telescope you won't need to stack to get a great image as its do damned bright!

[cid]

DSO's are gonna be a different optic with a helluva lot bigger aperture than I have, and a different camera (with more batteries) to do time exposures.
OTOH -- one time I did a fifteen-or-so second time exposure on a tracking mount with a 35mm camera with maybe a 100mm lens...hmmm...a roll of those developed but not printed, just put on a CD (Walgreen's still does that), now that's some material for stacking...as before, any results will be posted here.