Full Moon HDR composite (work in progress)

Copyright Benjamin Gomes-Casseres 2009

The image below was taken on Dec 1, 2009 with Takahashi FS102 at prime focus. It is a composite of 18 1/250sec exposures at ASA 200, with Canon 20D and IP3.75.

I have matching composite images at 1/500s, 1/1000s, 1/2000s, and 1/4000s and want to align and combine all of these into a High Dynamic Range image. For that, I will need to align these images that each are of different density (the shorter exposures are hardly even visible, but the data are there). I can't seem to get IP 3.75 to do that automatically and haven't figured out how to get PS CS4 to do it manually. IP did align the shots in each sets of exposures very well, automatically with Planet Align; the results were sharp and well aligned (see below). But when trying to do that with the composites at different exposures, it always gets them wildly wrong. I tried to crop them all to be more or less "close", but IP Planet Align actually throws them off from this rough alignment. What to do?

Alignment issue solved: Used Star Align with Translate only and Aristarchus marked as reference point on each images.It worked. Average of images is below. I haven't tried HDR composite yet.

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