Thoughts from Starlight Cascade

I am attempting to learn how to stack or combine or layer multiple images ontop of each other.
Specifically to take all of the images of meteors taken throughout the night and put them together into a single image showing all of the meteors.
We’ll start simply, with only two images taken from 2013 February 11th:

The output should look something like this (this is 4 images put together manually in corel photopaint…whereas we want to automate the process under Linux).
Let’s try this command: convert ev_20130211_*.png +append ev_20130211.png	This takes two 640×480 images and turns it into a 1280×480 image side by side. Not what we want.
Let’s try composite ev_20130211_*.png ev_20130211.png	No.. that didn’t seem to work either
montage -mode concatenate -tile 1x ev_20130211_*.png ev_20130211.png	Nope.
convert -combine ev_20130211_*.png ev_20130211.png	Getting closer
convert -flatten ev_20130211_*.png ev_20130211.png	no.. lost the 2nd image
convert -combine -compose over ev_20130211_*.png ev_20130211.png	nope
convert ev_20130211_*.png -evaluate-sequence mean ev_20130211.png This is very close but dimmed
convert ev_20130211_*.png -evaluate-sequence add ev_20130211.png	this looks good but after 5 or 10 images it turns all white (from the add function)

convert ev_20130211_*.png -evaluate-sequence max ev_20130211.png
gives us this result:

Got it!
This is how to stack or combine multiple images from a nights run of meteor imaging into one single image that shows all of the meteors in one image.

A better example is from 15 images from 2012 August 08:
convert ev_20120808_*.png -evaluate-sequence max ev_20120808.png