Eight months is just a long cooling off period, not a character flaw. My brother’s sat for a year before he dusted it off, and now he won't shut up about how easy it is to seal a bag of soup flat.

That "moon moved too fast between panels" part is EXACTLY my pain point from last spring. I was timing things by hand too and got stretched, smeared edges that looked awful. Switching to a remote trigger was the game changer for me, it let me fire shots with barely any gap. For overlap, I went way overboard and did like 40% overlap instead of the usual 20, it made stitching SO much easier even if I had to shoot more frames. Also, I stopped fighting the alignment software and just used the free ICE tool, then touched up the seam with a clone brush in GIMP. That one visible seam you mentioned, I had it too, but a little feathering on the blend option fixed it completely.