Siril set up questions

[redeye64]

l finally got my rig out on a cloudless night last weekend, got ASIAIR working, PA'ed and managed to take a test run (10 shots of SMC at 30sec) but no flats, darks, biases....am yet to wrap my head around them
Downloaded Siril, installed it (with Starnet as well) and added scripts for no flats/darks & DBF's.
Now.....l've created the requisite folders and here is where l'm getting stuck. I've put the whole file set from the asiair into the lights folder Q.1. do l only add the actual FITS files or the whole lot(see attached pic)? Either way l get stopped at this stage (pic 2)and am using the OSC preprocassing without DBF script
Q.2 do the 4 folders need to be in Pictures? l have them in a "astro" folder on desktop

[floyd_2]

Have you set your Home directory to be the root of the lights directory? That might be the problem. Eg. If your lights are in c:\pics\M42\lights then you need to set your home directory to be c:\pics\M42. Click the house icon at the top left of the screen to set your home directory first. Also, just put your fit files in the lights subdirectory.

[AstroViking]

Hi Paul,

As Dean said, you need to have all your FIT files arranged into 4 separate folders (subdirectories) - as per my attached screenshot.

You use Siril's 'HOME' button to navigate to the folder that holds your lights/darks/biases/flats folders, then run the relevant script to get the process started.

Cheers,
V

[cafuego]

If ll you have are lights, you don't really need to use the scripts for stacking.

On the main conversion window, click the `+` and add all your lights. Then enter a sequence name, untick the `Symbolic link` box, tick the `Debayer` box at the right hand side and click `Convert`.

When done, go to Registration, leave as-is I guess (deep sky) and register all images. Then go to plot, right click any dots on the plot that have a much higher FVWM then the average and exclude them, then stack.

Doing that exclusion step will get you a sharper result than the script would.

After stacking, I *usually* run photometric colour calibration first.

Now, turn on auto-stretch and run `Background extraction`. Since you have no flats, you'll need this. Do not let it generate automagic points, instead set the smoothing to 1, then manually add points in each corner and in the middle of each edge. Do not set them on a star, but on a dark bit. Nothing in the center of the image. Select `Division` and then compute background.

The image will get noisier, but there should be less vignette. This is fine. Turn off auto-stretch and set it back to linear.

Then starnet star removal. Remember to tick the Pre-stretch and Recompose boxes.

Actual stretching on recompose is a dark-ish art, but there are fairly decent video tutorials that show you how it works :-)

Mostly the trick is to not set the sliders right in one go, but adjust a bit, then apply, then adjust again, until you see faint detail and do not blow out bright areas.

Good luck!