It allows to merge a series of photos into a single image, where the relative motion of the stars creates structures looking like star trails. Deep Sky Stacker for Mac - posted in CCD/CMOS Astro Camera Imaging & Processing.StarStaX is a fast multi-platform image stacking and blending software, which is developed primarily for Star Trail Photography. WHAT IS STACKING?deep sky stacker vs sequator, Planetarium and other Planning Software. A free trial version is available on the developer's website.To stack, or not to stack? Most astrophotographers will agree it’s necessity with deep sky images, but is it really necessary for lunar imaging when the moon is so big and bright in the sky? There are a lot of single frame photos of the moon that show incredible detail, so is it really worthwhile going through the process of taking dozens, or even hundreds or thousands of images and then stacking them? Are the results really that visible? In this article, I we’ll go through the process of stacking a lunar image and see the results at each step along the way. It does this by compositing several images taken in rapid succession, shifting the sky as needed to align the stars. Starry Landscape Stacker makes it possible to produce landscape photographs taken at night that have both low noise and stars rendered as points.
![]() The mechanics of processing the moon, sun, or planets vary slightly in process and equipment, but they all contain these steps. THE PROCESSThese are the major steps involved in processing a solar system image. In this case, I won’t be covering the fine details of how to use each and every program used in the process, but will talk about the basic workflow that applies to any software you do this with. A popular one for Mac users, called Starry Landscape Stacker, is very good and I have heard great things about it.This article will be focusing on lunar stacking. Planets are so small that they are still tiny in the field of view at that resolution. The camera is set to capture high frame rate / low resolution video like 30-60 fps at 640 x 480 resolution. Generally, this is also the method used with a DSLR. These webcams will typically shoot exposures of 30 to 100 frames per second, or 1/30th to 1/100th of a second. Since solar system objects are very bright compared to deep space objects, exposures of more than a few fractions of a second will blow them out completely. Solar system imaging is generally done with a dedicated webcam type camera attached to a telescope instead of a DSLR, and the camera shoots video instead of still frames. Star Stacking Software Full Panorama OfYou can also shoot the moon with a manually tracked telescope on any type of mount. Since you won’t be tracking, you’ll have to manually readjust your framing from time to time to keep the moon in your field of view. You can also shoot the moon easily with a 300+mm lens on a stationary tripod. Tracking isn’t necessarily required to shoot the moon. Craters will be seen in astounding detail, but if you wish to see the entire moon, a DSLR is the only way to go unless you want to take potentially dozens of videos, stack them into images and then create a full panorama of the moon.For this lunar image, I used a Nikon D5100 attached to an Explore Scientific 80ED apochromatic telescope mounted on a Celestron Advanced VX mount. Using such a webcam results in very high magnification views of the moon. I could easily have also shot HD video of the moon at 30 fps with the same exposure settings and used the resulting video to process in the next step. I also shot 10 dark frames (images shot at the same setting but with lens cap on) to reduce noise. My camera was set at ISO 100 with exposures of 1/160 of a second. It’s a great image with sharp focus and good brightness. Many people would proudly share such an image online with little to no other post-processing and be quite happy with it. It’s quite bright and very detailed. The moon occupies a rather small space near the centre of the frame. The end result would have been the same.This is the RAW file as it came off the camera converted to JPG without any editing. Citizen watch serial number checkerIf your polar alignment and tracking are accurate, your target should be in the centre of the field of view throughout the entire series of images. When shooting with a tracker or equatorial mount, alignment isn’t as critical. And since the moon is so bright due to its advanced waxing gibbous stage, there’s very little contrast between light and dark areas.Heavy zoom showing pixellated detail and noise.The first step to preparing your images is to align your frames, crop them to size, and normalize the brightness. Fine details such as craters are a bit blurry due to atmospheric distortion. You want to maintain the highest possible quality through your workflow.Original, unprocessed RAW image converted straight to JPG.But zooming in on said image and examining it closer, fine detail shows that there is some visible pixellation and noise. And if you’re not dealing with video files, use TIFF as your intermediary format and only save out a JPG at the very end for your final image to share online. This is pretty self-explanatory.From the Processing Options tab, I chose to stretch the histogram to 75% and set the black point to 0%. And I also selected the Solar/Lunar Full Disc under the Optimise Options For section. Since I put in a series of images, it automatically selected Join Mode since these are all pics of a single object. This free program is available for Windows, Linux and MacOS and I highly recommend it to anyone shooting and stacking images of solar system objects.I loaded my images and my dark frames in their respective spots under the Source Files tab in PIPP. Pre-processing will remove this dead space making for much faster alignment and stacking.For pre-processing, I use PIPP – Planetary Imaging PreProcessor. Processing full 10+ MP still photos will take a LONG time, so this pre-processing step will save you a lot of time.Not that even when shooting HD video at 1920 x 1080, you’ll still have a lot of black space on either side of your target. And this is the resulting image. But either way should work.Then finally, I ran the whole process. AVI output is the default option and is perfect for lower resolution final images or 640 x 480 video, But I find larger video files sometimes don’t play nice with other stacking software, so I prefer saving images taken with my DSLR as TIFF. This left me the moon nicely framed with a bit of space around it.From the Quality Options tab, I selected Enable Quality Estimation and Reorder Frames in Quality Order check boxes This will order the images from highest to lowest quality for later stacking.From the Output Options tab, I chose the output format to be TIFF, which saves a series of TIFF files. In this tab, I also chose to crop the image to 1200 x 1200. ![]() Since all my shots were of exceptional quality (all rated 98%+ in PiPP), I told AS2 to stack the top 90%, for a total of 414 frames.This is the resulting image with everything stacked. But more on sharpening later.When stacking, the software will analyze each frame for quality. It’s basically an all-in-one tool for your solar system processeing, whereas AS2 only stacks. RS6 is a favourite of many because it does both the stacking and sharpening stage. It’s completely smoothed out, is noise-free, and small details that were fuzzy and still pixellated in the last step are showing fine detail that wasn’t visible before.At this stage, the fine detail still looks a little fuzzy, but you can see that there’s no noise, and fine detail that wasn’t visible in the original pre-processed image is now visible, albeit a little blurred.
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