Siril - registering and stacking images

[Tenor Viol]

I think because the metadata (exif) for FITS file format date is a mandatory tag

[happy-kat]

I get an image which needs mirroring to correct.

The three channels are in it but even using compose it still looks this grey sludge.

Siril 0.9.12 W10 also says it is up to date

[Tenor Viol]

@alacant Ah - interesting about RAW files. I would have expected it to complain... The Z6 has been out a couple of years now.... I'll flag up a ticket for it tomorrow. I have got PS to create 16 bit TIFF files and got Siril to convert them. That worked OK and I got a meaningful image back in the RGB window.

Took me a while to realise that in the Sequence tab, there's not a lot to do if you only aha eat one sequence... the Siril Youtube video and the comet PDF are not very explanatory.

Then went to Register. Hitting issue 'select area' appears in red but little explanation of what is required. I eventually sussed that I needed to click on the image and draw box. There's no guidance / recommendations of what is a good option here... So I drew a bo around teh comet that included some stars and selected 1 star process. The cooling fan went into overdrive (this is an i7 2.5GHz quad core MacBook Pro with 16gb RAM - it should have enough grunt...).

Stack was then very quick. 

At the end of it if did seem to have successfully stacked the comet, but some of the stars are 'doubled'. I doubt the comet has moved that much between the 1st and 5th frame...

So good news it's working with a bit of a workaround, although for 5 files PS was quicker. However, this would be quicker if dealing with dozens of files as the PS method is one at a time.    

[Tenor Viol]

This is s the image with the doubled stars. Ignore the bright glow etc I was just faffing around - I'll clean it up.

[happy-kat]

That's come out much better, and you got colour.

this is how I did it, after conversion I did register one star (the register button is not yet active) and then go to the image list dialog and select the star on the image then go back to the register tab (there is a follow star option) and register, then choose comet in the drop down list and then the accumulative option and then on the image list dialog chose the fist image and box the comet then  back to register tab and pick the first box, then back to the image list dialog and pick the last image and box the comet then back to register tab and select second box, then the register button (ensure accumulative is selected). The register process was run twice once for the stars and then for the comet adding it to the first pass. Then on to stacking which was pretty fast. I am currently giving DSS another go.

[alacant]

7 hours ago, happy-kat said:

Siril 0.9.12 W10 also says it is up to date

It you want the latest version -recommended- on windows or anything else, you can build it  from the source code.

HTH

[happy-kat]

Thanks.

I have got DSS to work oddly on stacking on the comet only but the stars were good too, yet comet and stars was poor stars.

Anyway using Siril right now and aligning on a box selection of stars before  add the comet to the registration, if this is not successful I will see about the link you gave.

[Tenor Viol]

I'll have another go at mine and see if I can do better

[happy-kat]

If I can get colour into this I'll be happy. DSS is getting better with stacking just on the comet though the below if from siril. I whittled the 90 frames to those that had no cloud in the comet ended up with just 35 x 6 seconds, very pleased to have captured the long ionised tail, minor crop and 50% resized.

[SteveBz]

If you've got fewer than ten or so, why not do it by hand?  Just open your editor of choice and import your photos as layers. Set all but the bottom one to 'difference' mode one at a time. Align each one.  At the end switch 'difference' to 'screen' mode, export as jpg and Robert's your father's brother.

[Tenor Viol]

2 hours ago, SteveBz said:

If you've got fewer than ten or so, why not do it by hand?  Just open your editor of choice and import your photos as layers. Set all but the bottom one to 'difference' mode one at a time. Align each one.  At the end switch 'difference' to 'screen' mode, export as jpg and Robert's your father's brother.

Hi - yes I actually did that using PS and with a handful of images that is entirely feasible. I was looking forwards to when my 'scope arrives and I start some serious imaging and I might be looking at dozens of images to stack. So, I was looking for a solution that is viable on a MacBook. 

[SteveBz]

The version of Siril that I have (on Linux) is 0.99.3 with its beautiful new GUI. I'm pretty sure it runs on mac too. I also use deepskystacker under wine, which also works fine, I don't know if you can get wine for mac. WINE runs Windows In Nix Environments, or Wine Is Not an Emulator.
However my recent stackings show Siril does a tighter job than DSS and also starts your post-processing like asinh stretch and color balancing with photometry.

Good luck.

Steve.