Auto Align stopped aligning stacked astro photos taken this week

[Dean2018]

Auto Align has been bulletproof aligning stacks of 10 (and more) wide field night sky images. This past week I have been making images of the Neowise Comet. The images load and stack as layers into PS as usual. Selecting all layers then clicking auto-align layers > auto > OK should show the progress bar indicating that the alignment procedure is processing. Not with these recent images. When I click OK absolutely nothing happens. I manually align using the difference blending mode but have been spoiled by the convenience of auto alignment. And here is the kicker, I just tried auto aligning 10 raw night sky images (Pleadies Star Cluster) that I made this past October and the process worked perfectly.

would not auto-align today, imaged 17 Jul 2020auto-aligned today, imaged 28 Oct 2019

[sidaths]

I just noticed this as well after trying an astro stack after a long time. Why has this feature regressed for this use case?