Couldn't you use manual tracking at first? The steadiness of the tracking isn't so important if every individual exposure is short, and most cameras have a cont

Couldn't you use manual tracking at first? The steadiness of the tracking isn't so important if every individual exposure is short, and most cameras have a continuous mode so you can take many thousands of photographs. I've successfully stacked hand-held photos using Hugin: http://hugin.sourceforge.net/ http://hugin.sourceforge.net/ You will probably need a camera with raw support for this to work, because each individual exposure will be extremely noisy, and any in-camera noise reduction will destroy too much detail. You will probably also need at least two bright stars in frame for alignment to work. And if you have a huge number of images you can also keep only those with low atmospheric distortion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_imaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_imaging The same principle could be used to keep only those images with little tracking-induced motion blur.