Pendleton, OR
ASG Observatory
NGC2244
IC405, IC410, IC417, NGC1931
NGC 3372
NGC 1499
NGC7000
M45
Horsehead & Flame Nebula
Barnard 33
Stacking images with Astro Pixel Processor is like using photoshop or pixinsight to process your images. It’s the right tool for the job with the quality and precision you want with a piece of software you will use with every session. APP offers a range of tools, calibration methods, and settings to help complete your stacking and really prepare images that you have likely taken hours to acquire.
There are free tools like Deep Sky Stacker, but when you jump up to the control that APP offers in their stacking software, you will likely not want to stop using it and revert to other software for stacking. It is like using a free paint program vs photoshop.
The performance of APP really shines when it comes to mosaic and more complex data sets. We offer a comprehensive comparison of DSS vs APP and also a full section on how to use and create mosaics with APP, be sure to check those pages out.
Watch a short video as we stack a set of narrowband images in APP.
In this video we stack the same NGC7000 North America nebula 30 image narrowband stack to compare with DSS. APP offers many more options in it’s tool, and while it does cost several hundred dollars, it can produce a little better quality with the controls it offers. Whether that cost is acceptable to your not is entirely up to you.
APP does excel in several areas; its mosaic ability to multi-band blend and run local normalization on those mosaics is actually pretty incredible. It also offers some nice tools at the end to create RGB images out of narrowband channels, and even preview various color palettes before saving our your final stacked image. While all possible in post processing software, just handy to do it right there with previews in many cases as well as simple stretches.
In this video we stack the same NGC7000 North America nebula with 120 images taking in a 2×2 quadrant mosaic panel. We discuss not only how I go about planning using stellarium, but then the stack processes unique to APP.
Multi-Band Blending (MBB) and Local Normalization Correction (LNC) are the two key factors to consider when stacking mosaics with APP and it does a fantastic job of blending and correcting sub-images when combined.