Stacking Milky Way Images

Processing
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All;

I have been reading about stacking Milky Way images. I have a few questions:

  • I see lots of talk about SIRIL, can GIMP do this too? are there other open source options?

  • It seems like the suggestion is to shoot a set of images and use them for dstacking, however it seems the recommendation is to shoot the whole series at the same exposure, iso, etc - Would I get the same result by making 200 copies of the same image?

Thanks in advance

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GIMP can probably do this, but it would be a manual process. Enfuse or even Imagemagick could probably be used as well.

No. The purpose of stacking multiple images is to boost the signal-to-noise ratio. Noise (random data that the sensor collects) will different from frame to frame - stacking software averages out the noise, resulting in better signal. The noise from 200 copies of the same image will not be random - it will be exactly the same in each image, so you will get no benefit from it.

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I don’t know about other open source ones but there are other free ones with some advantages and drawbacks over siril:

  • DeepSkyStacker (http://deepskystacker.free.fr/) does mostly what siril does, it i Windows only
  • ASTAP (ASTAP, Astrometric Stacking Program) has the sources available (under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited*) and works on almost everything (MS-Windows 32 & 64 bit, Linux 32, 64 bit, MacOS 64 bit, Raspberry-Pi Linux 32 and 64 bit.)
  • Sequator (Sequator) works only on Windows but has an (maybe important) advantage that is able to do the stacking on both sky and foreground in the same go and eliminates the need for you to combine the images later (in case you plan to take nightscapes that include sky and foreground objects

The other question was already quite good answered.

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Siril will not be ideal for images containing both sky and landscape. If you only have the sky in them, it should be fine. Note that it doesn’t correct lens distortion.