Noise-Free Astrophotography with Starry Landscape Stacker (macOS) 

Raiatea Arcuri It's damn good at it. As long as you do a decent job of making sure stars are recognized (add red dots) it will usually find the outline of a tree nicely. of course, some small corrections might be needed.

I'd like to know the answer to this too!

Yes, do your lens corrections first. Most of the time i prefer the correction ON as it flattens the bubble out of my 14mm Samyang/Rockinon, but there is no rule, it's personal taste to your composition.

I noticed that too. The moon was rising, you could see the foreground was getting brighter. He did not cover that issue, and only made one exposure edit early on, then synced all the frames.

I'd like to know about this too?

Typically, I try to shoot at least 16 separate exposures. That's a good balance between noise reduction and shooting time.

Deepskystacker would be better suited for that than this

You can use VMware to run OSX from within Microsoft Windows.

Christopher DeAntonio correct

Starry Landscape Stacker already does what you are suggesting. It stacks the land using a median filter. The "mask" defines which parts of the image need to be aligned before stacking.

Not that I know of... I'll ask the developer and see what he says!

Thanks for the offer Ian - No need I tracked Ralph down....the answer is no :(

@@grahamestilwell7485 I saw that on his website too.

Star Eater :(

Rafaelinux They both habe the star eater problem!

ok I've searched it on Google and I've found the lonelyspeck's article, but it is just a software problem that can be easily fixed with an update

Thomas Pyttel the 1st Gen A7s does not have any star eating issues.

Davide unless you are a Sony engineer I doubt we will ever see such an update come to life.

Joseph Bryant I was using about the limit for exposure time that the focal length would allow before there would be star trails so there was no margin for extending shutter time. I used ISO 12800 because that tends to be the cleanest when using PP7 mode on my a7S, which is helpful for astro because it has a very bright live view. Lower ISOs in this mode appear just a little less clean versus 12800. Every camera is different in this regard.

Also, ETTR is particularly helpful when we have lots of light (like heavy light pollution or during daytime but doesn't really apply in the same way when we're already light limited, like in this case. Hope that helps.

It does help! and thanks for the prompt reply! And to be fair to you the ETTR video I watched did talk about heavy light pollution, so it's good to have a firm understanding of that now, thanks for the reminder!! For the exposure time I was thinking your camera was full frame and 18mm so would allow much longer than a 15 second exposure using the "500 rule". Does stacking usually require a shorter exposure time for better results?

Sorry I'm sure the is a frustrating and regularly questioned methodology. But thanks for you time and patience anyway.

Joseph Bryant Ultimately, in anything photography related, rules are made to be broken. The 500 rule is a great guideline to start with. But other factors (like the resolution of your camera, or where in the sky you are pointing) will affect the amount of star trailing so it's not ever a firm rule. I always start with the 500 rule if I'm not sure, and then adjust accordingly. I wanted to try to minimize the star trails quite a bit for this photo and stacking g essentially gave me more margin on the shutter time. Because I was planning to reduce noise with stacking, I could afford to gather a little less light per exposure so my stars would be closer to pinpoints. On further inspection, I may even wish I shot shorter, maybe 8-10 seconds for even more sharpness in the stars.

It is still a problem on the a7RII, a7SII from 4 seconds and longer exposures as of the latest firmware (3.0 on a7SII and 4.0 on a7RII). It also still affects bulb exposures on all the Sony Alpha cameras.

Yes, a Micro 4/3 camera is just fine. I've used a 1" in the past even!

Thomas Winstone yes of course. Ultimately, I wanted this to be a quick review of a basic workflow. That said, exposure blending is a great technique.

Lonely Speck thanks for the reply :) keep the videos coming. Love your work.

Ryan Luna No. Stacking only works because the noise profile changes between photos so you need to take many photos for the statistics filter to be able to remove the noise. Copying a single raw is like flipping a coin once on camera, it landing on heads and you saying it has a 100% chance of landing on heads because you can replay the video multiple time showing it landing on heads.

Similarly, the median value of a set of identical numbers is the same number. You'd get the same image.

lol...thanks for quick response. I was looking to cheat a little and skip all the manual alignment. :D

Ryan Luna Yeah, unfortunately, statistics prefers the hard way around.

btw...you ever use the median stack technique for a panorama? I'm guessing you'd need about 100 pics. Probably easier to just use a star tracker and grab 8+ images.

A full-resolution image is available for download in my Zeiss 18mm f/2.8 Batis Review here: www.lonelyspeck.com/zeiss-batis-18mm-f2-8-astrophotography-review/

Diego R. yeah, I've gone around before on which order to do it an I think this is best. Basically, in the process of stacking, we're trying to make ourselves a really nice RAW photo.

Nidhin Koz You could have checked the description and would have found out within 10 seconds

not really a person that reads the description before watching my videos lol. I'll take ownership of this one but i really don't think many (majority) people read the description before the videos.

I watched one for Sequator, not knowing it wasn't available for Mac until half way through the video - and so came here.

nevadaxtube check out Sequator, it's not as good imo, but is available on pc.

Thanks. I'll take a look.

Exactly the same here, and it was pretty early on in the video since I googled the program right away..

Nate88it yeah sequator works pretty well and it's free. But I only tested it with one stack of images so I can't really tell if it always works...

nevadaxtube Still not convinced to buy a Mac. Fingers crossed for a Win version.

I traveled about 500 feet for the whole sequence actually. It was taken with a regular ol' tripod, a lot of patience and a sore back.

You have no clue what your'e talking about.

Sequator, I hear is excellent.

I was wondering this too. I get so many hot pixels to clean up with longer exposures though. I wonder if a stack of several 2 or so min exposures might be a good balance between both techniques? Would be interesting to see the results of the stack method in the video vs one very long base iso exposure vs something in between. I might try it next time I'm out and have the time for it.

StarStaX

I used 19 frames but anywhere between 4 and 32 frames is adequate. The more, the better.

hari krishna the a6000 imho

what about the picture quality? Not about video

Thanks!