Hi Peter,
OK, where to start..... If you already know something I'm describing, feel free to ignore it and skip ahead.
First, as you said, Siril requires the images in a particular directory structure.
Let's say that I'm imaging NGC253, so my directory structure for one night's work (assuming I am only using one telescope / camera / filter combination) will look like this:
Code:
NGC253
+ Lights
+ Darks
+ Biases
+ Flats
Now, within that 'Lights' folder I can have images from multiple nights - provided I do not change the telescope / camera / filter combination.
If I then decide to use a different filter and collect more date, then I have to have 2 'home' directories for Siril to work with.
Yes, you need to run Siril twice - once over each 'home' directory - to stack each set of data into it's own 'result.fit' file.
Code:
NGC253_NoFilter
+ Lights
+ Darks
+ Biases
+ Flats
NGC253_Filter
+ Lights
+ Darks
+ Biases
+ Flats
If I then change telescopes, I will repeat each directory structure so that each telescope / camera / filter combination has it's own set of directories.
Code:
NGC253_Scope1_NoFilter
+ Lights
+ Darks
+ Biases
+ Flats
NGC253_Scope1_Filter
+ Lights
+ Darks
+ Biases
+ Flats
NGC253_Scope2_NoFilter
+ Lights
+ Darks
+ Biases
+ Flats
NGC253_Scope2_Filter
+ Lights
+ Darks
+ Biases
+ Flats
As you pointed out, it can get very messy! And you have to manually run Siril over each set of data. In. my example above, I would have to run Siril 4 times and have four output files that I then need to process / combine / whatever manually into my final image.
The downside to the above structure is that you will have multiple copies of your configuration images (particularly the Darks and Biases), taking up disk space in each 'home' directory.
(Yes, you can move the configuration files around as you process each dataset but that can get confusing and if you're like me, you'll forget to move them and then wonder why Siril is complaining.)
To get around this, I use a tool called 'Sirilic' for multi-configuration stacking. I tell Sirilic where all the relevant files are (for each session that I want to stack) and hit the 'Go' button. Sirilic then builds the Siril stacking script, stacks each set of data into an output file and then stacks those results files into one final output file.
I will point out that Sirilic is not user friendly and getting it installed, configured and working is possibly a topic for another post.
One other thing - Siril is VERY disk-space hungry. I once tried to stack a couple of night's worth of short duration images (several hundred exposures) and even with 700GBytes of space, Siril used it all up and failed.
Does this help at all?
Cheers,
V