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Hello all, I hope it's OK to post this thread (and that I'm using the correct forum). I wanted to introduce myself: I'm the Affinity Photo product expert and I work for Serif who are responsible for the Affinity range of software. I've already seen a couple of threads and posts here about Affinity Photo and its usefulness for astrophotography image editing. As it has been noted previously, version 1.9 launched with a dedicated workspace for stacking astrophotography data—this came about because one of the developers and myself are keen astrophotographers, and seeing as Affinity Photo has other advantages for astrophotography retouching it made sense to put the effort in so that people could stack in the software as well and therefore have an all-in-one solution. Basically, I'm a huge astrophotography geek, especially when it comes to the retouching aspect of the genre: I've been producing a variety of official video tutorials and providing macros (essentially the equivalent of 'actions') and example documents to try and make it as accessible as possible for people. I wanted to raise awareness about all this material that is available for people to take advantage of, and also to offer support on this forum if people had any questions about Affinity Photo for astrophotography. Video tutorials I've produced an array of video tutorials that cover stacking and subsequent editing techniques for various composition setups (e.g. one shot colour, LRGB, SHO, bi-colour, greyscale colour mapping), as well as some shorter videos that demonstrate how to use certain features like the background colour removal filter, file groups, sigma clipping etc. The best place to see them all is on YouTube with the Astrophotography playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjZ7Y0kROWit-4cZY2A-tiEsYaWzWQoIC Macros Since the release of version 1.9, I've been releasing and updating macros to support the software. As well as being a workflow aid to speed up the editing process, I also wanted to highlight the various non-destructive functionality that Photo offers, as the natural tendency is to try and recreate equivalent workflows from Photoshop which are not always the most efficient. The macro functionality includes: Automated tone stretching: normalised, logarithmic, colour preserving options. Composition setups: designed for greyscale data, these will quickly set up the appropriate layer structure, blend modes and colour mapping for combinations such as RGB, LRGB, SHO, HSO, HOO and many other variations, including more exotic combinations like HORGB-L and HaRGB-L. Structure enhancement, local contrast enhancement, structure softening, highlight brilliance enhancement Live luminosity masks that allow you to reduce background or star luminosity, produce weighted saturation masks etc Star reduction and fringing removal Star motion deconvolution Colour signal options including selective luminosity and saturation enhancement Noise reduction: luma and chroma, just chroma, structure denoising and harsh/blocky noise removal RGB and Min/Max calculation live luminosity options, to alter brightness and contribution of colour channel data Monochrome colour mapping for single greyscale data compositions Merge to 16-bit sRGB/wide gamut options (after tone stretching) to improve compositing performance on older/weaker machines. A separate 16-bit category with most macro behaviours tweaked to compensate for the difference in gamma compositing (32-bit uses linear compositing, 16-bit uses gamma transformed non-linear compositing). I tend to add to these macros and improve them quite regularly, and they are now on version 9! Alongside this latest release, I have finally managed to plan, record and edit a comprehensive video tutorial that covers how to use each macro in detail, and it's 41 minutes long! The tutorial can be viewed on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/s2vVO9WoDC0 I provide the macros as a free download, available on Gumroad (https://jamesritson.gumroad.com/l/jr_astrophotography_macros) and my website (https://jamesritson.co.uk/resources.html) Example documents I have started compiling finished example .afphoto document files and providing them so that people can explore the layer structure and see how various non-destructive retouching can be achieved. The documents are produced from a combination of my own data and from remote imaging services. The layers are all colour-coded (the key is provided in the readme PDF) and you are free to experiment with the layers to gain insight into how they are all being used to reach the final result. I provide these with an arbitrary £1 (GBP) fee, as Gumroad does not allow free downloads over a certain file size, and these documents are fairly large! Download link: https://jamesritson.gumroad.com/l/jr_astrophotography_example_documents There are currently 16 example documents featuring a variety of composition setups, and they are: California Nebula HOS Cone Nebula Ha Heart Nebula Ha Helix Nebula HORGB-L Orion Nebula OSC Rosette Nebula SHO Sculptor Galaxy LRGB Tarantula Nebula HaOIII Tarantula Nebula LRGB Crescent Nebula OHS Pleiades RGB Squid Nebula OSH Thor's Helmet HSO North America Nebula OSC Witch Head Nebula LRGB Rho Ophiuchi LRGB (OSC stands for one-shot-colour imagery from bayer sensors). Data sets and finished documents More recently, I have also been providing downloadable data sets along with a finished .afphoto example document. The idea is that you can stack the data yourself in Affinity Photo and learn what its stacking functionality is capable of (e.g. sigma clipping to reject outlier pixels, file groups to quickly stack multiple data sets), then follow along with the finished document to see which macros and techniques have been used to achieve the end result. All data is provided as calibrated FIT files, so there is no need to lengthen the stacking process with calibration frames. Like the example documents, I provide these with an arbitrary £1 (GBP) fee, as Gumroad does not allow free downloads over a certain file size, and the data sets are typically quite large. So far I have made available: Pleiades (M45) one shot colour bayer sensor: https://jamesritson.gumroad.com/l/pleiades Triangulum Galaxy (M33) monochrome LRGB: https://jamesritson.gumroad.com/l/triangulum_galaxy Orion Nebula (M42) bi-colour HOO: https://jamesritson.gumroad.com/l/orion_nebula I hope all the above material is of interest to fellow astrophotographers—we're always keen to find out if people are having a good experience with Affinity Photo for editing, and what the current frustrations or issues are. If anyone has any queries or feedback I've made sure to follow this thread so I can be notified. Thank you for your time!

Hello all, I wonder if you seen this happen before. I’m trying to stack around 300 30” images of the Pleiades in Siril. I tried to do it using my computer hard drive but it needed to many GB so I’m using my SSD instead. When I was using my hard drive the processing was much faster but due to short storage it stopped half way through. Now that I’m using my SSD it has been 10 hours already and it’s still pre processing! any advice?

Hello, I'm looking for some advice with combining different filter data in PixInsight. I currently have a few hours of the horsehead nebula using the Optolong l-extreme filter, and a few hours with the L-Pro because I forgot to swap it out! I also have relevant darks flats and bias frames. I'm also using an ASI533MC Pro. I'm using the same exposure time for both. What would be the best way to combine these in PixInsight? I usually use the WBPP script, but is this the best way? Would it be better to stack them individually and combine them using pixel math? Any help would be appreciated!

Hi all, I don’t really have a specific issue but was hoping someone might help with general advice for astrophotography. I’m using a 130pds with Canon 500D, shooting raw, on a belt driven guided Vixen-GP. Guiding is SVBony SV-106 50mm with qhy5l-ii-c. I did two test sessions - One on Monday night, one on Tuesday. Both nights were remarkably clear. (I know...hard to believe!) The first night I captured m81+m82 together, prime, with 1 minute 800 ISO images over about 90 minutes. I know that’s not a huge amount, but enough to gain some experience+confidence, I think. I learned that 1 minute at 800 probably isn’t enough but, regardless, the first subs looked usable. I noticed, after the session, that subs became darker as time went on. Shooting between around 22:00 and midnight that made some sense, as the sky was getting darker, but the subject (m81+m82) and stars got substantially darker too. I expected the backdrop would darken over time but the target+stars should remain around the same brightness. Am I wrong? The stack of these images really pleased me, though - Although the target galaxies weren’t particularly bright or well developed, the image was nice and clear and the backdrop smooth and dark. A success, from my perspective. For the second night I decided to improve by increasing the sub lengths and also decided to 2X Barlow and focus on just m82. I’m aware Barlow would make the subs much darker than at prime so I did some tests at 3 minute exposure. Not seeing a huge difference in target brightness I tried 4, 5, 6…and finally 8 minute. Surprised at how little difference there was I tested increasing ISO bit by bit too. I ended up taking 8 minute exposures at 3200 ISO, wondering why the target and stars still looked so faint. I only got around 10 subs but, this time, I noticed they became brighter as the night went on - The exact opposite of what happened the night before, shooting at the same time (22:00 to midnight) The stack this time was very disappointing - Very grainy/noisy, backdrop nowhere near as dark - Pretty much monochrome looking - It looked like something from the guide-cam but noisier! I’m stacking with DSS, took 5 or more dark frames for each session, and used the same flat frames for both sessions. I also tried stacking both sessions without flats, which didn’t account for the difference. Environment was the same both nights - Same setup position, same neighbourhoods lights (or unusual lack thereof!), no rising moon… I suppose my questions are Why would my lights get darker (background, stars, and target) as the night went on on night one? Why would my lights get lighter (background, stars, and target) as the night went on on night two? Why would night one stack perfectly but night two stack looks terrible? Safe to say 3200ISO was pushing it but the stack should still look better than any sub, no? Many thanks to anyone who read my wall o' text. First session first sub First session last sub First session stack Second session first sub Second session last sub First session stack

Hi, does anyone know what these faint red blue and green 'L' shaped lines in the attached image are? And more importantly how to get rid of them. They are a uniform shape and size and all across the frame. I don't seem to get these lines on single images, at least I can't see them. I have tried stacking through both Deep Sky Stacker and Sequator, and even used a different laptop but with the same result. The pictures were taken on a Canon EOS 450D through a Skywatcher 200P mounted on a EQ5 Pro. The mirrors seem ok and I don't have any issues when visually observing. Any help and advise gratefully received. Thanks

I tried stacking multiple times. Tried selecting images that looked similar. Still got this issue where there is a ring around the moon and you can see that the surface details are gone and there are boxes visible. This was my first attempt. I even tried changing the stack percentage to 50 but no success. In another attempt, the image looks washed out instead of being detailed. I am confused. I had taken the photos at the same time. Please tell me where I went wrong and help a beginner out DSCN5939_lapl5_ap25900.tif DSCN5939_lapl5_ap25900.tif

Im not exactly new to astrophotography but I am definitely new to stacking images. I first tried deep sky stacker because it seems it's what everyone uses. Almost every time I've tried stacking it only wants to stack 1 image cause of a star detection error. I made the detection threshold so it would detect the most amount of stars and it doesn't help. I read other posts and thought it was a focusing error on the stars so I made sure to focus the image as much as possible and the error still pops up. The Orion nebula picture is one of a data set where I tried to stack and the error came up but the stars are very clearly visible. Any suggestions?

I have a huge problem with DSS. About a week ago, I took 300, 2 second long exposures of Andromeda with my skywatcher 90/900. But when DSS started scanning the stars in the images, it only registered about 5 stars at 40%. And only 7 stars at 20%. I tried to stack them and selected stack 100% of frames, but it only stacked around 29. I even tried it at 4% where it registered around 40 stars, but DSS crashed mid process due to the immense amount of stars being scanned (60 000 per image at least). I tried it sooooo many times, but I don't get it to work. It somehow stacked 131 images I took of the lagune nebula (1 second lang exposure). You couldn't see the actual nebula, but some bright stars were there and DSS was able to stack. In the Andromeda pics, there were like 5 times more stars, but it didn't work. If anyone knows what's wrong, pls help me!!! I'm slowly loosing it on that nonsense.

Hi... Hope this is ok to post here. I've built an app to create star trail images and videos using an iPad or an iPhone and i'm really struggling to find beta testers. Check out the photo and video I've added to the post to see what it can do and and click the link if you want to try it out. https://sites.google.com/view/starstackerforios-beta/home for info. https://testflight.apple.com/join/7iLGfVDG to get the beta. It's free to have early access to the beta. I'm just hoping to get a bit of feedback before it releases. Many thanks! Star Stacker iOS.mp4

I like live stacking as I can see the image develop and it saved my hard drive being cluttered up with thousands of images. The downside, I have found is that if a cheeky wisp of cloud comes over, it often gets included (in spite of trying to clamp down the FWHM settings). Some of my images then have a like a grey smear over them. Then after and hour of live stacking I find it looks just like a greasy smear over the picture- which is a real pain to try and post process out. Always seems to happen when I pop indoors to make a drink etc. I noticed that there was a setting on SharpCap. to save the stack- save and reset. Which I have not used yet. So Im thinking maybe I should do shorter live stacks eg. 30s for 5-10 minutes and then stack the results in A!S or DSS, so I can weed out the poorest sets, and I least I get something. Gives me a chance to do any slight re-adjustment too. Is a stack of stacks the same as doing a longer stack? My rusty school maths says it should be - but thought I'd see if anyone else does this. (I guess the setting wouldn't be there otherwise) Thanks

When I stack with AstroArt 7 demo I get weird stars but I am sure I focused good. Why is that and how can I solve it?

Hi all, first off, still a newbie at imaging and astronomy for that mater. So i'm taking my first steps shooting the moon, with my Skymax 127 and Sony Alpha6300 in prime focus. I also used a moon filter but i guess next time i wont so i can match my shutter speed to my ISO since i've learned that's the way to go. I've shot quiete some pictures in RAW and tried stacking in Lynkeos (Mac over here), following are a single shot and the stacked one (40 shots converted to .png) Does anyone know where the purple/pink is coming from ? I guess one could get rid of it in post proces, but i'm not that advanced in image processing yet. Thanks!

I'm very new and green when it comes to image processing/photographing the night sky. I barely know any of the terms or lingo, but I very much want to get involved! Here's my question: What are flat, dark, and bias frames? How do you create these? Thanks.

This is probably silly, but anyway here it goes.... What would happen if say someone intended to shoot 100 of 60sec subs of orion nebula or Andromeda, and clouds rolled in the middle of the session or just got bored and stopped for a hot beverage. Now this poor fellow is left with only 50 subs and starts thinking of copying and renaming these 50 subs in the same folder (unaltered or with slight denoise or slight Gaussian blur) and stacking all of the 100 subs?

Hi is anyone using Regim to stack using a dslr modded , currently trying to work out the settings in regim , im using a modified canon 1000D , do i need to set up libraw within regim ? if anyone has good success in using regim i would be interested in hearing what settings you are using .

So here's a thing - it seems to me that astronomy is one of those not very straight forward hobbies. Last night I though it would just be the same as Friday night - set up, look at the moon take some pictures! Simples... Aw but not to be!! I'm good at setting up in the daylight, get my mount bang level (checked with electronic level app on phone...) Get it facing north with my beautiful brass compass and enter coordinates back to Kidderminster from Thame, then you would think just observe... Nah! Moon very wobbly with tinges of green on the edges... Barlowed it and got some superb views of Gassendi and the Hippalus Rilles albeit a bit wobbly... Then the tree came so I thought check out Jupiter the other side of the tree with the camera. Once again folks it appears I have a great deal of Astro luck! Couldn't find Jupes at first, camera in and out of diagonal, EP in and out of diagonal... Shall I just go to bed? Then just before my capitulation - Boom she appears as a large white circle! Mmm something to work on I thought... Messed with the Gain and Exposure, what's Gain mean? Now it's a smaller white ball no moons... Then after another stop and start - Boom!! a ball with bands on... Hello Jupiter my old friend I whisper like a sniper lining up a kill! Brainwave, blue filter! in she goes and Boom again deffo a Jupiter view (although very wobbly) Quick action - click the 'take a picture or million' button... Next quick, take a video or million button. Amazing here I am with a table chair laptop wonderful AVX mount and my Starwave 102 doing EAA.... It's not that clear and it looks like a black spot just above the main band... Er it couldn't be could it? Could it be? Not another transit surely.... Run indoors get the phone check my Jupiter moons app and Bingo is Io, only Io transiting Jupiter... Wonderful how lucky am I? I call my girlfriend down out of bed, look look she's sat at the table looking and and "can you get the image any sharper? Oh that's funny I thought the band's go horizontally".. a quick turn of the camera in the diagonal and she's happy! Flipping heck is it me how can she not be doing the I've just bagged a great target dance?? Amazing, another example for me of when things don't go perfect at the beginning, decide it's better to just give up and then a little while later having a wonderful moment. This hobby never lets me down! So today the result of all that is I have a million pictures (exaggerate a bit there) and not a clue what do so with em apart from maybe trying something I heard of called deep sky stacker... Should be interesting later. What a fun night in the end... never give up hang in there the joys are just a moment away.....

Hi there, I am still new to amateur astronomy and astrophotography. I recently took my first steps towards moon and Jupiter photography. While I am satisfied with my moon pictures, I am struggling with Jupiter. I am a bit desperate, so I hope that maybe someone good give me a couple of useful hints so I can learn and improve. When shooting Jupiter without any barlow lense or eyepiece, I manage to get a sharp picture and am actually reasonably satisfied with the results (see attachments named "ok.."). I use Firecapture to shoot something like 3000 single images (mostly JPEG because I had issues with other formats.. maybe this is one of my first mistakes) and stack them afterwards. When recording AVI movies with Firecapture and dissecting them to single pictures afterwards, my results are less sharp than taking photos, so I sticked to recording images instead of movies. When the image is stacked, I continue with editing using Registax. After tweaking around, I obtain a sharp image of Jupiter as a result. Now to my issue: I want to obtain bigger images from planets, especially Jupiter, and therefore bought a premium 3x barlow lense. I tested it on the moon and was very satisifed when comparing the view (and images) to my cheap 2x barlow lense. So I think I managed to see the difference and I think that the new barlow lense does quite well. When putting the ASI ZWO cam into the barlow lense and shooting Jupiter, the effects of the seeing increases (as I expected) and the image starts getting more noisy, but the single frames I see within Firecapture are still ok (at least that is what I think, maybe I am wrong there). I play around with the values for gain and shutter speed, select the Jupiter profile and start shooting (max. 180s because of Jupiter's rotation, I receive around 20 - 50 FPS, depends on the shutter speed, ofc). After 3 minutes, I receive between 2000 and 4500 single JPEGs, depending on my settings. Of course I know BMP or TIFF should be better, however I often have issues with Firecatpure's BMPs/TIFFs when putting them into pre-processing software such as Pipp. I pre-process, stack and edit my images and then still have a blurry Jupiter in front of me (see attachment, images named "stack.."). No matter what I do and how I tune the settings within Registax, Jupiter won't become any sharper when using the stacks which were recorded through my 3 x barlow lense. Could this be because of my recordings (bad image format, not enough frames..)? Do I need more frames when recording through a barlow lense? Or can't I do any better under the conditions of my site (see below)? Are there any tricks when recording through a barlow, do I need other settings or shall I use another software? I attached the stacked image ("stack6_raw.tif") and am curious if someone could get more out of it. For me, this tif looks like the stacked pictures of the small Jupiter pictures, and I managed to get them sharper. So I wonder if it's me or if I simply can't expect more when using a barlow lense? If so, how can I shoot bigger and sharper pictures of Jupiter then (without having to switch my telescope, I know that my Newton is not the "planet killer"). I am greatful for all hints! My equipment and software I use: EQ6-R Pro with GoTo 8" inch Newton (200PDS 200mm 1000mm f/5) 3x Premium Barlow ASI ZWO 290 Color and cooled Recording: Firecapture Preprocessing: Pipp (Planetary, output in TIF) Stacking: Autostackert 3 Editin: Registax6 My site: Germany Small town, lots of light pollution, but it's still "ok" Mid - strong seeing on most days stack6_raw.tif single_stack6.tif single_small_jupiter.tif

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Hello all - Luc Coiffier (author of DeepSkyStacker) has asked me to post his message about new versions of DeepSkyStacker - specifically there is now a 64 bit version The installers can be found here: 64 bit version - https://github.com/L...64Installer.exe 32 bit version - https://github.com/L...erInstaller.exe 64 bit version as a ZIP file - https://github.com/LucCoiffier/DSS/releases/download/4.1.0/DeepSkyStacker64Installer.zip 32 bit version as a ZIP file - https://github.com/LucCoiffier/DSS/releases/download/4.1.0/DeepSkyStackerInstaller.zip (The ZIP versions are provided if your web browser blocks exe file downloads) I (Tonk) will pick up any issues reported here - but Luc would prefer (if possible) for bugs to be reported on the DeepSkyStacker yahoo group - or if not possible you can also use the GitHub issues page found here - https://github.com/L...fier/DSS/issues If you are not yet aware - DeepSkyStacker is now an open source project on GitHub - https://github.com/LucCoiffier/DSS Regards Tonk pp Luc Coiffier

Hi, can anyone help with star detection in DSS. I have been getting some good images using my Star Discovery 150p and nikon d5100. I'm using a 2xbarlow as I know I can't gain prime focus on this OTA and keeping my exposures down to 25secs due to field rotation with it being a Altazimuth mount and this can also be corrected in processing. The problem I'm having is that when I put everything in to DSS and register the images, it detects hundreds of stars but when I stack them it tells me there's not enough stars and to change the threshold so it can stack more of the images! The threshold is already set all the way to the left at 2% I'm using 100 x 25sec exposures iso 1600, 25 x dark @ 25secs iso 1600 and 25 x bias @ 1/4000secs iso 1600 No matter what I do it will only stack the dark, the bias and 1x25secs exposure! Is there anyone out there that has had similar issues and can shed some light on this please.

Hi everyone. I'm currently running Linux on my laptop and just wanted to know the best stacking software is for an amateur to use. I tried installing registax with wine but it didn't work. I've tried out PIPP and didn't really get on with it. So far the only one I've gotten my head around is Siril by free astro. Would like to know what other software there is that works well on linux that is good for amateurs who have just started playing around with this.

I understand the purpose of shooting dark frames, but what are 'flats' used for? Is there a general ratio of darks and/or flats to process with the collection of images when you stack them?

Hi, Hoping for some help here.. Im trying to learn some basic processing in PixInsight, including the PreProcessing (calibration, registrering, stacking, etc.) Im using the only data I have, from my very first lights of M13, calibrated with a SUPER BIAS, no darks and flats yet. When doing it in DSS I get 7 images stacked and the stacked file looks OK. Switching to PixInsight it goes horribly wrong after stacking, and the stacked picture looks like the attached. I have done the whole process in two different ways, but get the same basic result. 1. Doing all the steps manually: Calibration, Debayering, SubFrameSelection, StarAlignment, Stacking. 2. Doing everyting with the BatchPreprocessing script I yield the same result, its like the subs aren't properly aligned, even though the process has eliminated A LOT of bad frames (from 26 to 5). Link to zip with the 5 registered light: https://www.dropbox.com/s/sj2ytaa00u5qlap/GREAT CLUSTER_LIGHT_45s_400iso.zip?dl=0 Hope someone can give me some pointers, none of the tutorials I have been following explains why this can happen. Thanks in advance stargazers!

Well, not really actually. For some reason the stacking process produced this strange image. Most likely the image registration process aligned on hot pixels. And since the camera (Liverpool Telescope) is used in two orientations (90 degrees rotation), this was the result. Two colliding galaxies. Or is that three colliding galaxies? Or four?

I'm looking for a simple algorithm to compare astronomical images (of the same sky region) against each other, compute their movement and rotation, to finally stack them. At the moment I'm already having a more or less working algorithm. First I extract all the stars out of an image (including information like brightness and FWHM), and then I walk trough all the resulting "points" and create triangles out of the current point and those two other stars that have the shortest distance to this star. This list of triangles is created for every image. After this I take one image as reference and then I walk through the list of triangles in the reference image to find a triangle in the other image with the same length of each side of the triangle (I also "allow" some tolerance due minimal relative differences of the star positions in each image). For this matches I calculate movement and rotation relative to the reference image. Last step is to find the matched triangles that have to same relative movement and rotation like the other matches. This is done by calculating the standard deviation, sorting out triangles that are not within 1 or 2 sigma and repeat this process until I have a very small standard deviation. The last part, finding "valid" triangles with the same movement/rotation, is working fine. The problem is that sometimes I have only like 2 or 3 "valid" triangles out of 300 initial triangles. All other triangles have side lengths different to those of the reference image. So I assume it's the way I generate my initial triangles which causes the problem. Sortings stars by their brightness and using this data to generate the triangles also doesn't work. So is there a better way to create the initial triangles in all the images? Clear Skies, David