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The ASTAP stack is less noisy and I think shows slightly better detail. Here is crop of the central area of a run of 30 lights and 30 flats from last week, side-by-side for comparison:. The DSS stack first: DSS Stack.jpg --- ASTAP stack.jpg They may have been processed slightly differently in StarTo...

I mis-spoke above - it actually took 31 minutes to process 30 light frames.

I think so, although I may have left the Colour smooth box checked and it definitely did not like my Bayer pattern setting. Just running it through again with (hopefully) these points addressed, but it is still looking to be a 15 minute job.

I've tried ASTAP a couple of times and had great difficulty getting it to work with the Canon raw files, but have since tried with the .fit files generated by my (new) ASI 2600. While it seems happier with these, it is painfully slow. A stack that DSS would have dealt with in under 3 minutes ASTAP i...

Hi Richard, nice to hear you are still up and running! By no means an expert in this, but I think you need to stack all the narrow band images separately but use just one reference frame. There is, as you say, quite a bit of displacement between the Ha channel and Sii and Oiii and I don't think it w...

I have found this too, in particular in the Shrink module none of the '?' buttons respond.

Perhaps the answer is to process each part of the mosaic in StarTools first, then import the StarTools images into Microsoft's Image Composite editor?

I find ICE can deal with this very well, particularly adjusting background levels.

Don't use the 'Shrink' button within the mask module - that's for changing the size of the mask. To change the size of the stars, having created your mask, 'Keep' it and then, when back on the main page, select the Shrink button there: shrink.jpg Here's what I got when operating on your image above,...

I thought this dso object should be reddish, am I wrong? Maybe these colors are due to the filters used? This object has been acquired using narrow band filters. Each filter produces a monochrome image. These individual monchrome channels can be assigned to any colour when combined in post processi...

I think it would definitely be worth stacking the different exposure lengths separately - almost uniquely for this target this seems to work. But normally settle on an exposure length that doesn't blow out the star cores and gives a histogram (if your camera and software support that) somewhere betw...