stacking images .registar vs imagesplus

[5ash (Philip)]

can anyone tell me which of these programs is best at stacking images. im interested in taking many short 2-3 minute exposures and stacking them to get an effective long exposure . can both programs do this ? which is the best? i do not need camera control or image processing.
regards philip

[h0ughy (David)]

registar best at stacking but images plus best at developing and tweeking image

[rogerg (Roger)]

I have not tried ImagePlus but I do use RegiStar regularly.

RegiStar will align (register) almost anything. I have regularly used it for stacking DSLR images which would have otherwise suffered field rotation, for stacking film images with DSLR images (completely different image scales, colours, etc), and more. Always successful.

The only time RegiStar has not correctly registered 100% of frames is when I shot the Pluto occultation back in July, at a FOV only 200 x 20 pixels. Neither CCDSoft, RegiStax or RegiStar can align all the frames correctly because of the low image brightness and small size I was working with to maximum FPS. RegiStar aligns about 90% of the frames correctly, the other programs just giveup.

I've used the combine in RegiStar quite a bit too, but don't find it much different to that of CCDSoft. It's Mean-Median function has sometimes proved to give the best results, a function that other programs don't have.

I am dissapointed RegiStar doesn't have a Drizzle combine algorithm but as they say, RegiStar is for registering designed to be used in combination with other programs, so they do not provide extensive image processing. RegiStar can save the registered images such that you could then align them with some other program.

You need to use RegiStar together with programs like RegiStax (for it's wavelet processing capabilities) and PhotoShop for other image processing. I suspect ImagePlus has the whole lot in one package, but probably not as good image registration.

Many programs will simply shift images left/right and up/down to align them, possibly rotating them also, but RegiStar will completely skew and distort images as necessary to make them match perfectly, meaning it can comphensate for field rotation, lensing, etc between exposures.

Roger.

[Striker (Tony)]

I have not used Registar but have heard it's very good.

I just prefer to use the one program and do all my stacking and calibration in Imagesplus.