Comparing popular Free Software astrophotography applications DSS, Siril and SetiAstroSuite pro

Описание: In this video we have a look at 3 popular Free / open source astrophotography applications: DSS, Siril and SetiAstroSuite pro.

We compare each doing a basic stack of 281 lights frames from a smart telescope. You might usually have fewer frames - on the other hand we often read of Siril users wanting to stack more than 2048 frames. If anything your frames may well be larger: these are 2Mpixel, but an APS-C sensor produces 24Mpixel frames, so you can draw your own conclusions about absolute times for your particular setup.

Postscript:
You might notice that despite Siril's lead in terms of average FWHM and ultra-low distortion in the registered and stacked image there is a higher level of noise in the Siril result and fewer stars are detected with default settings. It turns out there is a discrepancy between the parameters used in Siril and SASpro, and the results just represent the Drizzle trade-off between improved resolution recovery and increased image noise.

The discrepancy is between Siril's pixfrac drizzle parameter and SetiAstroSuite's drop shrink drizzle parameter. If you set pixfrac = 1.3 in Siril you get broadly comparable results to SASpro with drop shrink = 0.65: background noise of 3.2 / 1.8 / 3.5 (slightly lower than SASpro), mean FWHM of 4.65 (slightly sharper than SASpro), 5462 stars detected (30% more than SASpro), still the same ultra-low distortion and still an order of magnitude faster.