Live Stacking on NINA with Siril, possible ?

Siril can be used in command line. So for sure it could be implemented.

we started a live stacking feature a few months ago, itā€™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) Ā· Issues Ā· FA / Siril Ā· GitLab

Ahhh thatā€™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 !!!

We just need the skilled guy able to do it :smiley:

I am not that guy but would love to see it happen as well.

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Maybe it would be better to wait a little to have a more stable solution for live stacking on sirilā€™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 :slight_smile:
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 hereā€¦

One more question , is it possible to test the feature now ? How to do ? If it is simple to explainā€¦
When i see the site i cannot know from where to start :slight_smile:

Yes itā€™s possible, but itā€™s very simple and badly looking. Youā€™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 youā€™ll see a new red ā€˜recordā€™ icon on the toolbar, click it and it starts. When FITS files appear in the directory, they get aligned and stacked.

Itā€™s more than experimental and a lot of commits behind master.
So it is not recommended to use it except for tests.

Donā€™t worry, i canā€™t use itā€¦ i am really far from being able to recompile SIrilā€¦ I will wait a more stabilized versionā€¦ hope it could come very soon :slight_smile:

donĀ“t they (the light frames) also need to get calibrated with flats and dark masters before being 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 itā€™s not hard to add too.

A new feature (ping @cissou8 ) will help with flats and live stacking ;).

A fully preprocessed live-stack (including flats) would open the possibility to apply live stacking to ā€œDSO lucky imagingā€. Each short exposure could be evaluated on the fly for atmospheric distortion (FMHW, PSFā€¦) 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.

Is it the next dream?

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 wonā€™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 guessā€¦
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 alsoā€¦

Speed depends on many things: the size of images obviously, but also the quality of the demosaicing algorithm chosen, if cosmetic correction is enabled with dark calibration, if dark and flat calibration is used, the type of registration, and to a lesser extent the type of stacking.

Youā€™re talking about PI and siril here, but just to be clear: the best alternative is probably ALS, which is much better looking and dedicated to this task.

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oh i didnā€™t knew this oneā€¦
i will check too

Hi,

Iā€™m trying to test Siril with the LiveStacking option but I canā€™t get it to work.

When starting the livestacking session, Siril expects the image files in a certain directory and the following message appears:

ā€œLive Stacking waiting for filesā€
My question is this:

In which directory should the images be dumped and in what format?
The version Iā€™m testing is this:

Siril 1.1.0
commit 7db5e90
Unstable DevelopmentVersion

Thanks and regards

Luis

Hi, itā€™s the same directory as usual, the current working directory, and images are expected in FITS format currently. Maybe the FITS extension needs to be set to the extension of your files in the preferences.