By Chuck’s Astrophotography
2016.12.3
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Stacking astrophotography images is an extremely important step in getting quality images. There are many ways to go about the stacking process. In this video, I compare the two leading ways to stack raw images: DeepSkyStacker (DSS) and the PixInsight 1.8 stacker. They are both high quality products. Deep Sky Stacker also happens to be free. I will let you decide on the outcome (or winner) in this video. This video can also serve as a tutorial on how to stack raw astronomy images in Deep Sky Stacker and PixInsight. Note: The test object in this video was the Crescent Nebula captured with a hydrogen alpha filter.
Please note – this is processing a CMOS camera image. I cannot speak for DSS but the PI batch pre-processing script is not optimized for CMOS images, on account of the way CMOS sensors do a semi-automatic dark subtract on RAW files. If you check mean levels, a 20-min dark frame has a lower mean value than a bias frame, screwing up traditional calibration algorithms.
There are some good papers about but basically, you integrate bias and dark, calibrate flats with bias only and then calibrate lights with flat and dark only – without any dark frame scaling optimisation.
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The exposure time of bias is not matching,
You can try 1s exopsure bias, then you can calibrate it well.
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An honest and great video thanks
I use DSS for stacking and PI for processing
I have just got an Ha filter for my DSLR , to cominibe it with my one shoot RGB images do I just stack them all together in DSS? Would be grateful for your thoughts.
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I think DSS is very easy for stack and you are familar with it. And, yes, I think you still can stack all images in DSS.
One suggestion in the further is, Pixinsight is very powerful in calibration, align, stack, and processing, if you have time to learn it, I believe you can do all in PI, and will get very good image.
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