Astro stacking freeware

Here is my list of free astrophotography software and websites. Some of them I use on a daily basis while others I use only while imaging.

All of them are great resources to have and very beneficial to your imaging experience. Ascom Platform — This is the platform that connects all of your equipment to your computer. You can download the Ascom Platform and the drivers for Windows here. You can download all the ZWO drivers here.

Skywatcher — Again, since I use a Skywatcher mount, I am including it in this list. To be honest, I only use this if I have to troubleshoot connectivity to my mount. Youcan download Skywatcher software here. I started off with this software and I really like it. I did have a couple issues with the automatic meridian flip, but I got it figured out. The plate solving is super easy and the lay out is easier for beginners. You can download APT here. You can also create Depth Maps and 3D views from a set of images with this freeware.

TuFuse is an astounding free command line focus stacking software. It combines the best focused parts of multiple shots and produces evenly focused output images. Not only focus, it also combines the fairly exposed parts from multiple images.

So the final result is a combination of best focused and exposed portions of the images added. The algorithm implied here works pretty well and gives awesome result every time. It does not have a GUI and you will have to use certain set of commands to carry out the focus stacking process. If you are really not comfortable with carrying out command line operations, you can download PTAssembler , which is an image stitching software; TuFuse comes along with it and it serves as a GUI for TFuse.

To carryout these operations, you need to add special codes along with the above line of code. The list of codes can be found on the homepage of this software. ImageJ is a multiplatform image processing software that can perform focus stacking for free. It is an open source focus stacking software that runs on Java. The feature to stack photos does not comes inbuit but is available as a plugin.

The Plugin page of this software has a very vast list of plugins that can be used to manipulate photos; one of them is Stack Focuser.

Download the plugin, copy the downloaded file, and paste it in the Plugins folder of ImageJ. Now to stack images, open the software and load the images to be stacked, one by one. This turns all the open images into one stack. Stacking the images would certainly increase the signal to noise ratio, and you can even reject frames that are too blurry or compensate for the movement a bit, but you will never be able to go beyond the diffraction limit of the optics.

You will need a larger aperture to get more detail. Luckily, accurately determining offset in images is no problem at all for AutoStakkert! If you do have under-sampled images to play around with, the fun can begin.

I found an interesting data-set of a tiny video containing several frames of a moving car. One of these images is shown above. We can read the license plate, and the brand of the car. The effective resolution has increased significantly by using Super Resolution techniques in AS! All of a suddon we can read the license plate, and even the brand at the back of the car! We actually cleaned up the image and enhanced it. Super Resolution does indeed give you super resolution.

Drizzling was applied to several tiny sections in the images to compensate for any image distortions. Combine this with an accurate estimation of the location of the features throughout the image, and you can end up with a lot more resolution than you started with even when the field of view is changing.

Apart from making Hubble images sharper, Super Resolution is also applied to telescopes actually peaking down to earth. Some might find it interesting to see an enemy tank or structure when it was hardly visible in a single image.

More down to earth implications are to actually do what we did here: read license plates of speeding cars, or indeed to recognize the bad guys in a video of a robbery. Unless the bad guys wore masks of course. To sum things up: Super Resolution is real. If you have just one image containing a few pixels there is little you can do. But if you have a lot of slightly different and under-sampled versions of those pixels, then you can significantly increase the resolution of your images!

For planetary astrophotography this is hardly ever the case however. Sometimes drizzling can give sharper results for low focal length recordings: when imaging the Sun in good seeing conditions at low magnifications for example.

For short exposures of deepsky targets at lower focal lengths there is a much bigger chance it will actually increase the effective resolution.

For most planetary recordings there simply is little to gain by drizzling. Left: original image. Right: AutoStakkert!

Notice the the higher amount of detail in the super resolution image made by AS! Better results can likely be obtained when using more advanced deconvolution methods to get rid of residual image blurring. Instead of just presenting a new and unfinished AutoStakkert! I still have a long list of new features and bugfixes to implement. I know that some of these are more important than others, but somehow I always start implementing those ideas that I enjoy working on the most.

At the moment I seem to be very interested in getting the best performance out of AS! I know AS! However, if you can decrease the total processing time a lot, you could for example process more recordings in the same time, or experiment on the same recording to find better stacking parameters that will actually end up improving the image quality.

Release notes. Recent News. Enough with dark flats Dec 15 by Cyril Richard. Siril 1. Siril 0. Calibration Remove unwanted signal and pattern from RAW images is the main goal of the first step of preprocessing.