Deep Sky Stacker Hints

[zief]

Hi all,

I've tried looking around for a good program to stack images from both a tracked mount and shorter exposures from a tripod, and it seems most people are fairly happy with DSS. I can't seem to run it very well though so I am hoping for some tips. First of all, people say it reads Canon RAW, but it doesn't do that very well, so I've taken to exporting my images from Lightroom to TIFF. At first I did this in 16bit, but had memory problems, so now I do it in 8bit. However, once I get past around 10 images I still get an out of memory error! I have 16GB RAM and plenty of hard disk space. Can anyone shed any light to what I can do, perhaps it is a setting somewhere I don't need?

Thanks!

[Steve Ward]

You'll probably need the most recent beta version to take the Canon RAW files if you're using an 1100D , the earlier version takes the 1000D no problem but there's a subtle change in the RAW files I believe.

For a good tutorial try Doug's here ...

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWWaKkCUm6c

[Tinker1947]

The none beta DSS show the CR2 image as a 1/3 screen wide image, the beta version has the right drivers and works fine.....

[lensman57]

Hi all,

I've tried looking around for a good program to stack images from both a tracked mount and shorter exposures from a tripod, and it seems most people are fairly happy with DSS. I can't seem to run it very well though so I am hoping for some tips. First of all, people say it reads Canon RAW, but it doesn't do that very well, so I've taken to exporting my images from Lightroom to TIFF. At first I did this in 16bit, but had memory problems, so now I do it in 8bit. However, once I get past around 10 images I still get an out of memory error! I have 16GB RAM and plenty of hard disk space. Can anyone shed any light to what I can do, perhaps it is a setting somewhere I don't need?

Thanks!

First use the latest Beta, mine is 3.3.3 Beta 51. Once the window "check registered files " pops up make sure drizzle option is not checked under the stacking parameters section. DSS works in a 32 bit enviroment not 64 bit so it can only address just over 2 gig of ram even if your machine has 64 gig it can not use it. I also find that the DSLR files are unreasonably large , use the custom rectangle mode to crop the image to only contain the object of interest, no need to process unwanted data, the machine will work a lot faster too.

A.G