Whats the best program for stacking Widefields ?

[Stu Ward]

Messing around trying to take a Milky Way shot.

What program should you use for stacking ?

I have Deep Sky, but not sure if thats the best to use

Thanks

Stu

[multiweb (Marc)]

Originally Posted by Stu Ward

Messing around trying to take a Milky Way shot.

What program should you use for stacking ?

I have Deep Sky, but not sure if thats the best to use

Thanks

Stu

What ever you normally use for your longer FL shots. It'll work the same.

[Stu Ward]

But I haven't done any yet, that's why I'm asking.

Thanks

Stu

[multiweb (Marc)]

Originally Posted by Stu Ward

But I haven't done any yet, that's why I'm asking.

Thanks

Stu

Ah ok... Well DSS is free but I haven't used it in a long time. I use CCD Stack now. Keep in mind that when using short FL lenses 50mm and down your stars are very undersampled so if your shot is noisy then it will be hard for any software to find stars for aligning. It'll pick only the very brightest ones.

Having said that when imaging at 50mm or 35/25mm it is very likely the subs won't need any registration because the motion between each sub is negligible. Unless you have field rotation but even then it's ok on 5 to 10min subs.

Is this the info you were after?

[Octane (Humayun)]

IRIS.

But, my understanding is that DeepSkyStacker is essentially a pretty front end replacement for IRIS.

H

[Stu Ward]

I tried DSS, with around 14x 15 sec shots at ISO 3200 with the in camera noise reduction on.
The stacked TIFF was very dark ( as to be expected) but extracting the data with PS left a very noisy and disappointing final image

Can anyone point me in a better direction with regards to ISO setting etc ?

Thanks

Stuart

[Octane (Humayun)]

ISO-3200 is going to kill you every time.

What camera are you using? Try for somewhere in between ISO-400 to ISO-800 and expose for a lot longer.

Example: if at ISO-3200 you were imaging for 15 seconds, that is a difference of 3 stops to ISO-400. Your exposure would therefore be 2 minutes. Or, 1 minute at ISO-800.

H

[Stu Ward]

Originally Posted by Octane

ISO-3200 is going to kill you every time.

What camera are you using? Try for somewhere in between ISO-400 to ISO-800 and expose for a lot longer.

Example: if at ISO-3200 you were imaging for 15 seconds, that is a difference of 3 stops to ISO-400. Your exposure would therefore be 2 minutes. Or, 1 minute at ISO-800.

H

Thanks for that, I will try lower ISO, but as i'm mounting on a simple tripod i cant expose for too long due to trails.
I might try ISO 800 for 30 or 25 secs see how that goes

Thanks again

Stu

[mithrandir (Andrew)]

What focal length? ISO800, 30secs with ICNR, f2.8, 16mm on a fixed tripod works for me with no noticeable trailing. Any longer gets stuffed up by sky glow. Hanging the DSLR off a GEM mounted scope would completely solve the trailing.

I stacked some 70mm frames for one of the CAAP guys with Autopano to reasonable effect. The price is down to 99 Euro too.

Andrew

[Stu Ward]

Really struggling with DSS and the Milky way
Its not registering enough stars in the shots.
Taken 20 raws at ISO 800 and 30 secs exp.
Dss say that out of the 20 shots only one will stack

Doing my head in

Stu

[lepton3 (Ivan)]

Its not registering enough stars in the shots.
Taken 20 raws at ISO 800 and 30 secs exp.
Dss say that out of the 20 shots only one will stack

Unfortunately you are out of luck if you have the threshold as low as possible and DSS still won't recognize enough stars.

Why doesn't the author allow you to set a lower threshold?

Why not align on a single star?

Does my head in too

-Ivan

[Cosmic (Daniel)]

Originally Posted by Stu Ward

Really struggling with DSS and the Milky way
Its not registering enough stars in the shots.
Taken 20 raws at ISO 800 and 30 secs exp.
Dss say that out of the 20 shots only one will stack

Doing my head in

Stu

Stu try converting say 3 raws to tiff as a test and try registering them. I remember seeing that you had the 550d I convert all my images to tiff with great success. I have the star detection threshold at 10% under the advance tab in registering.

Hope this helps.
Dan