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The question often arrises from the above of what piece of software to use for stacking and processing the resulting images that you take using your camera. Or, also often the case, people don't realise that there is software available to make this easy. So here I am going to list a few options, hopefully making it easier for anyone who finds this page.
Deep Sky Stacking Programs for Digital SLR Cameras
A common aproach to astrophotography has become the use of Digital SLR cameras (DSLR). These are relatively cheap, can be used for astronomy and ordinary terrestrial photography, and produce surprisingly good astronomy images so have become quite popular.
There's a few basic steps required for getting started in DSLR astrophotography. I would summarise them as:
1. Buy a camera
2. Buy a tripod, telescope or other tracking platform
3. Acuqire a piece of software to help take long exposure photographs
4. Acquire a piece of software to process (including stack) the photographs you take.
The question often arrises from the above of what piece of software to use for stacking and processing the resulting images that you take using your camera. Or, also often the case, people don't realise that there is software available to make this easy. So here I am going to list a few options, hopefully making it easier for anyone who finds this page.
If you know of programs which are suitable for DSLR astrophotography image processing that are not on this list please let me know, also let me know if information here needs updating. Thankyou.
Software suitable for stacking and/or processing astrophotography DSLR images:
1. RegiStar
This is a fantastic piece of software for aligning and combining individal astrophotographs from digital SLR cameras. It works very efficiently with large files, is amazingly capable in aligning photographs and has quite good stacking algorithms built in as a bonus.
This software is primarily intended for simply the registering (aligning) of frames such that they can be combined. This piece of software is so good that you can combine old film images with new digital images, or digital images from different cameras with differnt focal lengths and all sorts. It will also easily handles field rotation (fixed tripod shots are OK) and pretty much any other distortion.
The only down side I have found to this software is that it does not read Canon RAW files, so conversion to some other format such as TIF is required first. The biggest implication of this is you must perform manual image reduction (bias, dark and flat frames) to the TIF files before aligning and stacking in RegiStar.
RegiStar can be scripted by writing script text files which are then executed by it. This makes it very powerful for automation, and can easily be automated to register & combine (stack) a list of 500 directories of images where each directory is a separate set of images of a separate FOV to be stacked.
Unfortunately excellence comes with a price, and in this case that's about US$159.
The version of RegiStar that I am familiar with is 1.0.
Find RegiStar here: http://www.aurigaimaging.com/
RegiStar would be an absolute winner if they enhanced it to support RAW formats and image reduction.
2. Deep Sky Stacker
This is a free and very capable piece of software for aligning, combining and performing post processing of astrophotographs from digital SLR cameras. The best thing about this software is that it's free, and amazingly capable for something that is free.
This software will read a very wide variety of file formats including Canon RAW format, and process them. I find that the strength of this program is it's ability to read RAW and apply reduction (dark, flat, bias) RAW files with great effect. This application of reduction frames has proved much more accurate for me than doing it manually from converted TIF files in PhotoShop.
I do not find the alignment routines of Deep Sky Stacker to be as reliable as that of RegiStar. I will often have situations where the corners of stacked images in Deep Sky Stacker appear to have additional distortion, often significant, because the frames have not been aligned optimally. If I then process the same in RegiStar I will see perfect results. Typically what I will do is first try processing the images in Deep Sky Stacker (because it handles reduction frames and RAW nicely) and if alignment is not perfect I will then process the images in RegiStar.
Deep Sky Stacker can be automated to some extent. You are able to build "file lists" by selecting the files you want to use in a stack then saving that list. A batch process can then run multiple "file lists" in sequence one after the other. This way you can build up a set of lists and leave it to work for an hour while you do something else. Unfortunately the "file lists" can't be constructed as plain text outside the program (to my knowledge) to allow more extensive automation.
From my experience with Deep Sky Stacker I have found the aligning and combining of images to be quite efficient but the post-processing of a stacked image to be relatively resource intensive and slow. As a result I quickly settled on using Deep Sky Stacker for the aligning and stacking of frames then saving the file and working with it in PhotoShop instead.
Find Deep Sky Stacker here: http://deepskystacker.free.fr/english/index.html
3. ImagePlus
I cannot say much about ImagePlus as I have not used it for DSLR image processing. However many people do and it comes highly recommended. You can find out plenty of information about it around the web.
Find ImagePlus here: http://www.mlunsold.com/
4. MaximDSLR
Again, I cannot say much about MaximDSLR as I have not used it at all. However it is reported to provide the complete DSLR astrophotography solution from focusing to image acquisition, aligning, stacking and processing.
Find MaximDSLR here: http://www.cyanogen.com/products/maxdslr_main.htm
5. CCDStack
CCDStacker is one of a suit of products made by ? aligned to advanced usage of telescopes. I find their product range very interesting and capable but unfortunately priced out of my range.
Find CCDStacker here: http://www.ccdware.com/products/ccdstack/
6. RegiStax
RegiStax is a very popular, extremely powerful and freely available stacking program for astronomy. You might be wondering why I have it at the bottom of the list here. From my experience RegiStax is brilliant for solar, lunar and planetary imaging but is not so good for deep sky and large megapixel images, this is why it's at the bottom. It is worth considering if you are new to the field, but I honestly believe it is most suitable to large numbers of small frames such as are used in lunar planetary imaging.
Find RegiStax here: http://www.astronomie.be/registax/
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