I am using NINA for imaging and i had the surprise to discover a new plugin able to do some nice live stacking by calling some PIX processes. I tested it and it works fine.
Now i was wondering if a plugin doing the same could be done but calling SIRIL instead of PIX ?
I don’t know if the internal architecture of SIRIL is able to be called by processes or fucntions, but if yes, maybe someone (not me for sure !) could be able to write such NINA plugin to give a live stacking capability based on SIRIL ?
maybe i am dreaming… but sometimes its good to dream
but, is it an easy task or a complex one ?
if i understand well, on Pix side, its a matter of calling some processes to be excetude on an image and get back the result, but in Siril is it also built on processes that can be called from outside like this ?
we started a live stacking feature a few months ago, it’s still unfinished and not in the official version, but it could be used for that. The principle is to react on new files arriving in the watched directory, aligning and stacking them.
If you want to develop or just try it, you can take a look here: Feature-Idea: Live-Stacking (#487) · Issues · FA / Siril · GitLab
Ahhh that’s great news, the only issue is that i am not skilled at all for developping !
But i will pass the info on NINA side, who knows maybe they could have someone willing to do that ?
Really that would a GREAT solution !!! NINA fully automatised imaging solution and more, able to do live stacking with great quality (i hope, but SIRIL is well recognized now for its quality !).
That would be awesome and quickly adopted by a lot of astronomers ! Sure !!!
Maybe it would be better to wait a little to have a more stable solution for live stacking on siril’s side, then we can look at how to do this plug-in, I think NINA is open source too so it must not be too hard
yes sure, its just thats its a feature so interesting for many users dreaming about it
On NINA side, its open source and the architecture has been opened through the plugins, so it should be feasible to create a plugin for that. The creator of NINA is aware and welcome any initiative on this side, he has created the PIX plugin for livestacking too, but pix is not free, so Siril could be a really good point here…
One more question , is it possible to test the feature now ? How to do ? If it is simple to explain…
When i see the site i cannot know from where to start
Yes it’s possible, but it’s very simple and badly looking. You’d have to compile siril, as explained here, but before starting the building part, make sure you run this command after the submodule command:
git checkout livestacking_fixed
Then for usage, start siril and set the directory as usual, and you’ll see a new red ‘record’ icon on the toolbar, click it and it starts. When FITS files appear in the directory, they get aligned and stacked.
yes sometimes, for live stacking the expected quality is not as high. For now I only activated dark calibration, not flats, because they take some time to be done and live stacking is about going fast. But it’s not hard to add too.
A fully preprocessed live-stack (including flats) would open the possibility to apply live stacking to “DSO lucky imaging”. Each short exposure could be evaluated on the fly for atmospheric distortion (FMHW, PSF…) and if the quality is OK preprocessed with dark & flat, then stacked. You end up with a single preprocessed and stacked image instead of a couple or more hard drives full with some thousands of frames.
There would be a lot of dead time for the preprocessing no doubt, nonetheless I am convinced that many would be ready to trade overhead for disk space. Moreover, if the preprocessing runs in parallel with the exposure time maybe the tradeoff could be still more acceptable.
Guiding (assuming there is the need for guiding under such circumstances) would also come for free, as the same image could be processed for guiding purposes as well.
Clearly the quality obtained by live-stacking will never reached the one obtained with long and painful processing.
The aim of Siril is to provide high-quality image. So yes, we will provide a live-stacking feature (but not soon as it is very experimental and we have a ton of bug fixes to do before the 1.0.0 release), but that won’t be the feature where we will focus all our mainstream.
Volunteers are of course welcome to speedup the process (and this live-stacking feature has been started by a volunteer), but Siril will remain above all a software for preprocessing and processing.
I agree, there is no solution today to get the same quality in live stacking as in post processing, the only one which is above all others seems to be Sharpcap, able to do a fast live stacking with many enhancements, but we stay far from the qualtity of the post processing results.
But its clearly interesting to see up to where quality soft like Siril wil be able to go for live stacking functions, one main issue being the time to process each images i guess…
My trial on NINA with Pix, which give nice results, needs also 22sec for each images, which is a surprise, not so painfull, but with a Ryzen 2600X proc also…
