Stacking software for Macbook Pro

[Jon Sales]

I have a 2012 MacBook Pro and I'm finding it hard to find any stacking software for my astrophotos.

I have CS6 but don't know how to use it so was wondering if there is anything any easier to use.

Any ideas?

[perfrej]

Pixinsight is the best, Nebulosity 3 works...

/per

[LouisJB]

you can run DSS (and registax) on a Mac, either with the usual VM/bootcamp method or in fact you can find it packaged as a Wine mac app where it will run straight on the mac, that's what I use.

[Richie092]

Am just downloading the trial version of Pixinsight to use on my imac so will let you know how it runs.

[Richie092]

Ooh it looks a bit scary! Am off to download Harry's tutorials before I start pressing buttons.

[Jon Sales]

Thanks guys, just downloaded Nebulousity.

Whats a Wine Mac app?

[russp]

I got DSS running under wine but it wouldn't process my stack - ran out of memory and that's on the highest spec recent iMac with all processor and graphic card upgrades! It may have been the file sizes  (I couldn't load my raw files so used huge tiffs) or the fact that I had the settings wrong (it was registering over 100,000 stars in each sub) but it took nearly 24 hours to register the subs and wouldn't stack them at all.

PixInsight took less about 10 minutes to register and stack. Nebulosity worked fine but the demo puts horrid lines across the image so it's difficult to see how good it is. 

On balance I can see why PixInsight costs so much and when the trial is over I'll probably buy a licence. If Neb supported my camera I'd probably have just bought that but it doesn't support any Nikons.

[Martin Meredith]

You could also consider regim  which is a Java app and therefore runs on most platforms.

From the description: Regim is not meant to replace complex image processing systems like Adobe Photoshop or others. It is meant as an addition to them. It makes some processing steps that are unique to astronomical images a bit easier. These steps are calibration (dark and flat), deblooming, registration, combination, color calibration, gradient removal and some more.

Martin

[DoctorD]

Hi

I have DSS running under wine on my 2009 MBP  sing "PlayonMac" which makes the installation easier - mind you I only process small images from my video camera or Lodestar so I'm not sure how it will perform with DSLR images.

I recently purchased Nebulosity 3 Nebulosity when I noticed a significant difference in the De-bayer algorithm - DSS looks very pixelated, whereas Nebulosity seems to work much better - for $80 or about £50 it's a good starting point. Stacking is not fully automatic, you need to select 2 stars for alignment then confirm each selection - this can be skipped and yo can select the default choice.

I think it will be a long time before I out grow Nebulosity!

Hope this helps

Paul