This is probably only of interest to a few, but I thought I would share a process I'm using to deal with a zillion lights.
With my short exposures resulting in thousands of lights and my Alt/Az field rotation, there are some real advantages in SIRIL in stacking my lights in 10 or 20 subsets and then stacking those results together. Spot testing indicates the quality is, on average, equivalent. Below a small test with the Hidden Galaxy showing stacking 20 subsets (20 sets of 72 * 8 Second Lights) and then stacking those together versus stacking all lights at once.
I've done about 4 tests and found that they are materially equivalent. There are always very minor differences in noise and details but once finally processed with equivalent levels of processing to the best of my ability, they are generally indistinguishable. Any remaining differences are much less than minor editing preferences like small adjustments of sharpening applied or the amount of noise reduction... so even minor editing difference tweaks are a much greater impact. In other words, the remaining differences are in the noise, so to speak. So this indicates to me for all practical purposes, stacking as substacks and stacking them all together is equivalent enough to be a good option for me.
Here is one example of the core of the Hidden Galaxy taking a couple of nights ago and just roughly processed:
You may have to click on the link to get the .GIF to animate:
Also, I did notice PIPP compressed the GIF just a tad and there is a tiny bit of posterization (quantization of light levels) in the bright core. That is not a stacking artifact.
A couple more details on stacking the substacks:
1) I crated the substacks with SIRIL.
2) I stacked the substacks with both SIRIL and APP to compare. They were equivalent. I used weighting based on quality in APP and basded on SNR in SIRIL.
3) I did light processing on each with the same parameters: BXT, Stack based color correction, Some NXT, and finally a tweak of stretch and color correction to make them roughly equal in brightness, contrast, and color cast to make comparison easier.
For me there are a couple implications:
1) I can do this on my long captures with thousands of lights to reduce stacking time and disk space requirements. It turn out that these aren't completely linear, especially for Alt/Az captures with field rotation over time, so stacking from substacks can be several times faster and 1/2 the disk space.
2) I can save these substacks as "virtual long lights" of ,say, 10 or 20 mintues each, to then more easily integrate together with other sub-stacks on multilight captures as I add more data later or in the following years.
Finally, I have SIRIL scripts to do this all other than splitting th lights up. I just place 5% or 10% of the lights in each of the 10 or 20 predefined directories in a predefined folder (light1, light2, light3...) along with the Biases and Flats and run the script. SIRIL creates one set of Biase and Flats masters and then stacks each directory and then stacks all these results together. So it only takes 2-3 minutes to setup to run.
- Steven
Edited by smiller, 03 April 2024 - 11:03 AM.
