Basically title, I only have the lights.
From my very short experience, yes, you can. I did it twice without those frames.
The thing is that you won’t be able to remove noise as successfully as it would be with those auxiliar frames.
As for star alignment, provided you have a good amount of stars, I don’t see a problem. Try it.
I did, and got stuck at registering the frames. The button was greyed out, and inactive.
Do you have a good amount of stars?
Maybe go manual (mark a couple of stars for the registering process)
I would say so, but who knows. This is one of the 20 frames I have.
I’ll have to look into manually marking some of the stars, although I don’t remember finding that option on first try.
Wow, plenty of them, manual registering doesn’t seem to be necessary.
Try reviewing your workflow first, before trying the manual way. You may have missed something.
Sorry but I can’t look at it now.
I was able to go through and register, then stack, but I have pretty much no idea what I’m doing. The output was a red image, with some very very faint stars, but visible enough to see the software (or maybe I) did a piss-poor job at aligning them. The program is way too complex for me. I find it frustrating and obtuse. Maybe I’m just not smart enough.
I guess I’ll have to stick to using Sequator in Wine.
Wait, I think you made it.
I remember that the pop up window that shows the result can show ssparate channels, or the rgb result with all channels together. See if that’s the case.
Also, at that point, you can save a tf and then open it on some raw editor, whdrd you will tweak curves et all.
I’ll give it another shot, but man oh man, the workflow is a lot like sticking hot needles in my eyeballs.
As much as I appreciate all the FOSS, I find it always is way more complex than it needs to be. It’s like everybody that uses FOSS should have a degree in software engineering.
I’ll have a look and try following that write-up.
Maybe that tutorial doesn’t fit his case, since he doesn’t have darks, bias and the other ones I forgott the name.
@zerosapte would you mind sharing the pictures?
It doesn’t and only confuses me further.
This time I got stuck at stacking. I don’t know why the button is inactive.
I got the outputs in three separate channels but I can’t move further. I can’t stack, I can’t find how to save a tiff out of the three-channel output of registering.
This is doing my head in.
Hi @zerosapte, of course you can skip the use of preprocessing frames (darks, bias, flats). You either do the simple stacking from the Siril GUI, or you can use the command line.
Do you prefer using the GUI, or using command line and/or scripts?
I prefer understanding what I’m doing, why it works or doesn’t. So far this is not happening.
I can try to give you a step-by-step process, but tell me if you want to use the GUI or commands (in Siril there’s a command prompt in which you can type commands directly).
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GUI please. I only just recently made the jump to Linux after 20 years of Windows.
I’m used to using the command line, because it allows doing more astro-centric stuff. But here’s a simple guide:
- In the “File conversion” tab:
a. set the working directory to where your images are stored (“Change dir…” button")
b. click the " + Add" button to load the raw files
c. in the “Sequence name” field type “lights_”
d. click on “Convert” and monitor the output log until its done.
EDIT: I forgot to mention that if you use raw files, make sure to check the “Debayer” check box.
Now the “lights_.seq” sequence is loaded.
- Go the “Registration” tab" and just click on “Go register” (using the settings as in the screenshot below), and monitor the output log until it’s done.
Now a “r_lights_.seq” sequence is loaded.
- Go to the “Stacking” tab and press “Start stacking” (using the settings as in the screenshot below), and monitor the output log until it’s done. The result is store in the “r_lights_stacked.fit” file.
-
Go to “File” > “Open” and open the “r_lights_stacked.fit” file. It should open 2 windows, one in RGB colors, and one with the 3 color channels in their own tab.
-
If you want to get and save a brighter image, go to “Image Processing” > “Histogram Transformation”, and click on the “Apply autostretch algorithm…” button, and press “Apply”.
- To save the resulting image, go to “File” > “Save as”, choose the “TIFF” file format because you’ll need to further process the image later to correct colors in your favorite image editor (make sure to choose “16-bit unsigned integer” in the TIFF options.
Using the command line or scripts, you can benefit from quick/automatic preprocessing (removing green cast, perform RL deconvolution sharpening, detect and remove hot/cold pixels, crop…). That’s where an astro-centric program is really useful.
In fact, if you just want to align and stack images, even Hugin can do it quite well:
- Load images and choose “Align_stack_images” to create the control points
- Optimize for “Positions”
- In the “Stitcher” tab check just “Combined stacks > Exposure fused stacks”
I’ve tried that and it works well on aligning stars and cleaning the noise with dark frames. But it leaves the foreground (if any) just as noisy.
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Dude, thank you.
I’m not at my PC, but it seems what escaped me were steps 4 and onwards.
Thanks again.
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In fact it’s by reading scripts made by Siril users that I understood how Siril works. It’s not always obvious at first.