Pendleton, OR
ASG Observatory
NGC2244
IC405, IC410, IC417, NGC1931
NGC 3372
NGC 1499
NGC7000
M45
Horsehead & Flame Nebula
Barnard 33
Deep Sky Stacker is a free utility software that allows astro-imagers to stack their sub exposures into one larger composite image for processing. Most final processing such as stretching, curving, and color tone adjustments are all done in pixinsight or photoshop.
DSS is a nice free utility that will take images and register stars and layer their images one by one as well as give basic image quality scores and star FWHM figures. If you are looking to utilize some freeware, DSS is a fast software that does the job. It has more complex features for mosaics, which work well, but we prefer Astro Pixel Processor after doing a full comprehensive review for more complex data or if you are looking for finer control over your stacking, calibration, and normalizing of data.
For a full review, watch our video as we introduce DSS below, or our comparison against APP.
Watch a short video as we stack a set of narrowband images in DSS.
This video we discuss combining the 30 subs of NGC7000 North America nebula using Deep Sky Stacker. The software is freeware and is a great choice to start stacking and get used to how the process of registering, integrating, and calibrating your images. The menu is someone non-intuitive but you quickly learn how it works.
DSS is very fast, and it registers and aligns things quickly, especially if you had a lot of subs to work with. You do need to kick out narrow band individual calibration stacks separately which can be kind of annoying after a while, and the option sets to adjust things are just not at the level of the APP software, but if you want free, and you need a tool to get you 99% of the way there, it works great.