Linux Command line tools for stacking

[Wyvernp]

Morning, 

A thought occurred to me the other day to use Amazon web services computing power to stack my images. This will allow me to "rent" a 96 core 192GB ram machine for about £1.50 per hour which would be much cheaper than springing out for a new PC (on the basis that I upload the subs, fire up the machine, stack, download and shut down as you don't pay whilst it's shut down). The snag is that for me to get it at that price it has to be linux, which is fine but I'm not familiar with stacking tools which can be run as a command line. Ideally I'd like to use something like pixinsight but without the user interface. Has anyone done anything like this before? 

Cheers,

Wyvern

Edited April 23, 2020 by Wyvernp

[Tomatobro]

There was a post on this in Imaging and Stacking using Gimp. Interesting idea

[fireshipjohn]

Hi Wyvern, it does not need to be command line only, you can run a Ubuntu/Debian desktop and VNC to it, use CLI when its available, I use ASTAP on Astroberry and its pretty good for stacking and alignment. It works on a Raspberry Pi4 so I have no doubt its really fast on that sort of hardware! 

Don't forget the upload/download time and bandwidth in that equation though.

 

Edited April 23, 2020 by fireshipjohn

[vlaiv]

I'm afraid you will need to code it yourself.

PixInsight actually has open source library with all algorithms that it uses - maybe that would be a good starting point, since you don't really need to implement all of it - just combine different bits in wanted workflow.

Another option would be ImageJ as it is java based - I know it can be scripted in various languages - not sure if it can work headless.

 

[Wyvernp]

Thanks for the feedback so far! yep I could definitely run a UI on top initially however my endgame would be to automate the process using the user data to initialise the stack command somewhat like the following workflow.

Upload subs to S3 bucket (storage) -> start server -> transfer subs to server -> execute stack command with configurable params -> output stacked image -> transfer to S3 -> shutdown

That of course is oversimplified as you'd need to specify what flat/dark files to use, stacking algorithm and all sorts of other things. And yes of course I would need to factor in bandwidth costs etc.

[Wyvernp]

3 minutes ago, vlaiv said:

I'm afraid you will need to code it yourself.

PixInsight actually has open source library with all algorithms that it uses - maybe that would be a good starting point, since you don't really need to implement all of it - just combine different bits in wanted workflow.

Another option would be ImageJ as it is java based - I know it can be scripted in various languages - not sure if it can work headless.

 

Thanks, I'll look into that. I'd consider myself a reasonable beginner coder so not afraid to give that a go.

Who knows...maybe if I can get something that works I'll start a "stacking as a service" 😂

Edited April 23, 2020 by Wyvernp

[vlaiv]

5 minutes ago, Wyvernp said:

Thanks, I'll look into that. I'd consider myself a reasonable beginner coder so not afraid to give that a go.

I've got some experience as developer as well and like to think of and develop new algorithms, so you can give me a shout if you need some help figuring things out (unfortunately, I won't be able to code much since I'm swamped with work, but would be happy to explain different algorithms and their benefits if I'm familiar with them).

[Wyvernp]

Thank you, much appreciated. I'll keep this thread updated as I find out more.