Stacking methods

Luc Coiffier DeepSkyStacker (DSS) Processing Stacking Deep Sky Emission Nebula
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Peyton Lorimor avatar
Peyton Lorimor avatar
I’m working on a multi night project targeting the Heart Nebula at the moment, and I’m curious as to what method(s) I can use to combine these sessions into the best final product. I currently stack using DSS, but I have heard PixInsight may be more effective?

I have some data from a bortle 4 site, and some from bortle 7. Assuming the bortle 4 data is better, will stacking it alongside the bortle 7 benefit  it, or just drag it down?
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dkamen avatar
dkamen avatar
They will have significantly different background levels so averaging them will tend to produce a washed out result.

They need to be normalized (brought to roughly the same brightness and background level as the reference sub by adding or multiplying with a correction factor) before stacking. DSS cannot do that. Siril, APP, PixInsight, they all can.
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Nick Grundy avatar
Nick Grundy avatar
I would suggest stacking them as different sessions in AstroPixelProcessor(APP). Although I've been tempted recently to shift to Pixinsight pre-processing, APP has always been good to me. If you go with APP, I would recommend experimenting with the data inclusion. I spent several hours this evening testing different combos in a stack. (more data from multiple scope vs higher qaulity data, etc). So far all I can tell is that I don't trust the scoring mechanisms in APP. I recommend analyzing your subs ahead of time and stacking 100% of what you end up loading into APP. 

If anyone out there has a more complete understanding of multi-band-blending in APP, I'd love to hear their descriptions on pros/cons of including different FOV datasets
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