ASTRONOMY IMAGE STACKING SOFTWARE MANUAL
ASTRONOMY IMAGE STACKING SOFTWARE FULL
ASTRONOMY IMAGE STACKING SOFTWARE ANDROID
ASTRONOMY IMAGE STACKING SOFTWARE MAC

Having set up the program options, one simply presses ‘Start’ and watches a log of the progress.Īfter the ‘Successful completion!’ statement (note the elapsed time) as seen in the first image below, one clicks on ‘Close’ and the stacked result appears as in the the second image below. Having tried out various alternatives (possible as the stacking process is so quick), I came to the conclusion that, for this data set, the best final image came when selecting none of them.

ASTRONOMY IMAGE STACKING SOFTWARE MANUAL

The Sequator manual ( ) gives a description of all the stacking options. The ‘High dynamic range’ option tries to prevent parts of the image ‘blowing out’ so helping to preserves the star colours and does a great job of suppressing the significant light pollution that is within the frames. I suggest that you try these out with a small number of frames to see what suits your data best. There are various stacking options, for example, the ‘Remove dynamic noise’ mode will attempt to eliminate hot pixels. Perhaps surprisingly, before the aligning and stacking takes place one needs to select the name of the resulting Tiff file and the location into which it is to be placed. For a stack like this, there is no need to specify a reference frame with Sequator selecting one from the middle of the stack itself. A double click on the top button allows one to select the frames that will be aligned and stacked. The Sequator opening screen has a set of commands at its left which should be applied downwards in turn.

ASTRONOMY IMAGE STACKING SOFTWARE FULL

It is also far faster: for this set of 56, full frame, raw files, Sequator took just over 2 minutes using my i7 laptop whereas Deep Sky Stacker took over 13 minutes. There is no need, for example, to first set the star detection threshold. It has a very simple interface and is far easier to use by beginners. So I was very interested to see how Sequator handled the raw files. So, along with quite a number of other astrophotographers, I have been first converting my raw files into Tiff files before stacking in Deep Sky Stacker. This could possibly be that Raw Therapee uses a more sophisticated de-Bayering algorithm or that Deep Sky Stacker overexposes them when processing the raw files so increasing their size and reducing their saturation. NEF raw files in Deep Sky Stacker and that the star images were somewhat tighter. I discovered that the result when stacking the Tiff files derived by Raw Therapee gave a far better colour to the bright blue stars within the cluster than that derived directly from the. It could be well worth reading this article. NEF raw files were first converted into Tiff files.

In an extensive article, ‘ Deep Sky Stacker: could it be worth first converting raw files into Tiffs? A case study imaging M35 and NGC 2158’, I came to the conclusion that the best results were obtained when the. I was not using a field flattener, but the stellar images were perfect across the unvignetted field of view. As a result, the field was significantly vignetted but the two clusters were well covered. The telescope has a 3-inch focuser but, having a 2-inch barrel, could not be expected to cover the full frame sensor.

ASTRONOMY IMAGE STACKING SOFTWARE ANDROID

The D610 was controlled over a USB cable from an Android tablet using the program qDslrDashboard and took 56, 20 second, exposures at an ISO of 800. The raw frames had been taken using a full frame Nikon D610 attached to a CFF Telescope’s 127 mm apochromat refractor employing an aspherical oil-spaced triplet objective. I currently do not have any wide angle data to try out, but decided to test Sequator with a set of Nikon raw files that I have extensively tried out with Deep Sky Stacker. As a result, the stars within the sky will be sharp as will be the foreground. The programs will then stack the sky area accounting for the movement of the stars across the sky but stack the foreground with no movement. The sky area is selected leaving the foreground unselected. In this case, a fixed tripod is used with exposures short enough to prevent star trailing. They both have the ability to treat the sky and any foreground separately – great for wide angle night landscapes.

ASTRONOMY IMAGE STACKING SOFTWARE MAC

The former is only available for the Mac and the latter for Windows. More recently, two new stacking programs have become available Starry Landscape Stacker (~£38.99) and Sequator (free, but a contribution by paypal for a cup of coffee or two is suggested).

The latest 64-bit version seems very stable. For many years I have been using Deep Sky Stacker to align and stack my short exposure frames to give the result of a longer exposure.

Astronomy image stacking software