astrophotography stacking software sequator

#ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY STACKING SOFTWARE SEQUATOR ISO#

In each case I have included a crop of the stretched image and a second, to its right, having corrected the colour balance and saturation levels to give the best possible result. The images were then stretched using applications of the ‘Levels’ command shifting the middle slider to the left to ~1.3 and adjusting the left (black point) slider to the right as required to reduce the noise levels in the image. The two layers were then flattened using the ‘Difference’ blending mode. These were the cloned over from neighbouring parts of the frame to give a uniform measure of the light pollution background which was smoothed further with an application of the Gaussian Blur filter with a radius of 40 pixels. This removed the stars leaving just bright regions around the Orion and Running Man nebulae. The base image layer was duplicated and the ‘Dust and Scratches’ filter applied with a radius of 30 pixels. In every case I processed the resulting stacked images as well as I could in Adobe Photoshop. Stars in a single frame having removed the light pollution When the light pollution is removed from this frame, the chromatic aberration surrounding the brighter stars is obvious – in this respect the FS60 is not one of Takahashi’s best refractors though it has superb sharpness and contrast. A single frame showing the light pollution This is easily removed in post processing of the stacked image as will be shown below. A single raw frame, converted to a Tiff file, is shown below and is seen to suffer from significant light pollution. Long exposure noise reduction was not used. Though termed a fluorite apochromat, it does suffer from a little chromatic aberration.

#ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY STACKING SOFTWARE SEQUATOR ISO#

I took 45, 15 second, raw frames exposed at an ISO of 2,000 from an urban location using a Sony A7 II, 24 megapixel, camera coupled to a Takahashi FS 60 refractor and Televue 0.8 focal reducer to give an effective focal length of 284 mm. The first data set : a wide field image of the Sword of Orion Some of the significant differences in the program execution times may relate to how the various steps are carried. For instance, APP say that ‘it uses very high precision star location using Intensity Weighted Centroiding’. The program obviously has to locate the brighter stars in each frame and some of the programs may do this more accurately than others. So the same set of 45 raw files of the Sword of Orion region was processed seven times with DSS processing both raw and Tiff files. Neither DSS nor Sequator state what debayering method is used so I have also included a test with DSS where Raw Therapee has first been used to convert the raw files into Tiff files. Interested in comparing its results with those obtained by the other software

Sharpness and will make stars rounder when compared to the well-known AHD and Method developed by its author called ‘Adaptive Airy Disk’ that it is stated ‘will reduce green/magenta cast in your RGB data, will improve The VNG (Variable Number of Gradiants) method used by Siril. Two of the better are said the be the ‘AMAZE’ method used by the Raw Therapee raw conversion program and Method to some quite sophisticated methods.

Of deBayering methods ranging for the very fast, but crude, ‘nearest neighbour’ This is usually the first step and there are quite a number It includes two free programs, Siril and Images Plus, a third, either ‘rented or purchased’ program, Astro Pixel Processor and the updated version of Affinity Photo. Here is a further look at the topic comparing the results of stacking the same data with 6 programs. There are two further articles on this topic in the digest: the first is a discussion of the program Sequator and Deep Sky Stacker and the second as to whether it might be worth first converting raw files into Tiff files before using them within an alignment and stacking program. An article in the author’s Astronomy Digest –

Astrophotography stacking software sequator