How do I stack over several nights and months (using DSS)?

[SiD the Turtle]

Over the last three months I've had three attempts at photographing M101 from my backyard. I now have:

• Lights from each night
• Darks from each night (excessive as the temperature was pretty constant?) and a master dark for each night.
• A set of 200 biases and a master bias.
• Flats for the second night (need to do some flats for the third night now) and a master flat for that second night.

How can I put these all in the pot and get a decent master file in DSS? I know for example I could in theory create one master dark and use it across all as it shouldn't have changed much, but I would want each flat to correspond to each set of lights, as the dust etc will have moved. I also assume I don't want to create a master for each evening and then try and combine them as I'll lose a lot of data.

What's the 'best practice' here?

[happy-kat]

You could use the group tab in DSS. You could check the DSS help on seeing which calibration files go in which of your group tabs as some are for the individual groups and others are global applied to the entire stack. As you can tick off a file you can add any single light to then expose the group tab (along the bottom) then later remember to tick off that first file.

[SiD the Turtle]

Thanks, completely didn't notice that right at the bottom of the window!