Starry Landscape Stacker Mac Starry Landscape Stacker

  1. Starry Landscape Stacker Mac Starry Landscape Stacker Trial Download
  2. Starry Landscape Stacker
  3. Starry Landscape Stacker Mac Starry Landscape Stacker Mac
  4. Starry Landscape Stacker Mac
  1. Starry Landscape Stacker is available in the Mac App Store, and a free trial is available that has all the features but outputs images with a watermark. You can read more about it here, and Ralph Hill, the author of Starry Landscape Stacker, has a great collection of video tutorials on how to use the program here.
  2. This tutorial is not intended to be an in depth guide to the program Starry Landscape Stacker more walk through of what I do myself with my own images. I talk about what to do at time of capture to capture the images I use for stacking, I also show you the tricks I have learnt while using this program so you can avoid the mistakes I have.
  3. Starry Landscape Stacker is a Mac app for making images of the night sky with stars as points and low-noise. It uses 'stacking' or 'image averaging' to combine a group of images that were captured in rapid succession with identical exposure settings and the camera in a fixed position.

Starry Sky Stacker is for pictures of the sky, with no foreground, taken with a tracking device so that the stars do not move within the frame. If you have pictures taken with the camera fixed on a tripod you should consider using Starry Landscape Stacker. Starry Sky Stacker requires Mac OS 10.11 or newer.

The Milky Way rises over a fairly intimate canyon view in Canyonlands National Park in Utah. The green color in the sky is from airglow.

Introduction

If you’ve done any night photography, then you’re likely very familiar with the noise of exposures in low light using a high ISO. But the noise isn’t all just from the high ISO. If you exposure for a longer period of time, you’ll capture more light, and have a higher signal to noise ratio, meaning less noise. A higher signal will result in less noise even with a high ISO (depending on your camera, modern sensors are much better). However, when shooting the Milky Way you’re usually going for short star trails, or completely pinpoint (trail-less) stars, which means you’re limited in how long you can expose before the stars appear to move too much in the frame. So you’re stuck using a shutter speed that isn’t long enough to capture enough light for a high signal, and having to use a high ISO as well to boost the signal to a usable level, which can add additional noise to the image (although how much depends on your camera).
The result is that you’re usually shooting with a shutter speed that captures enough light for tolerable noise, but it’s also probably long enough that the stars trail in the frame. If you try shooting with a short enough shutter speed to capture completely motionless stars, the noise level can be so high (depending on your camera and lens f-stop) that the exposure is either unusable or needs a ridiculous amount of noise reduction, resulting in large size prints that can look very grainy or blocky due noise or noise reduction. Noise reduction tools these days are great, but they can’t fix everything all the time.
Fortunately there are ways to capture both pinpoint stars and achieve low noise. You can either use a star tracker with very long shutter speeds to capture a lot of light and thus a high signal to noise ratio, or you can use star stacking, a method of capturing multiple photos with shorter shutter speeds that are then aligned and averaged in software to reduce noise. Or you can combine a star tracker with star stacking for incredibly low noise.

Left: 20 seconds @ ISO 12,800 – Note the star trails
Center: 10 seconds @ ISO 12,800 – Pinpoint stars but more noise (brightened to show detail)
Right: Star stacked result of 10 exposures at 10 seconds each – Pinpoint stars and low noise
All shots with the Nikon D810A and Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens @ 14mm and f/2.8

The image above contains three 100% crops from the same night, all shot with the Nikon D810A and the Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens @ 14mm, f/2.8, and ISO 12,800. On the left is a shot taken with a shutter speed of 20 seconds, the center is 10 seconds, and the right is the star stacked result of 10 exposures at 10 seconds each. Notice how the image on the left has lower noise than the 10 second shot in the middle, but the image on the left also has longer star trails. By star stacking, we get the result on the right, pinpoint stars and low noise. It’s hard to tell on these small images on the web, but the noise in the star stacked result is much less than the noise in the 20 second exposure.

What About a Star Tracker?

Before we get into star stacking, you might be wondering if you could just us a star tracker, a device that sits on top of your tripod and turns with the rotation of the earth so that your camera can follow the stars, capturing long exposures with no star movement. You can certainly do this, but that requires lugging around the star tracker, and polar aligning the tracker every time you move your tripod. This is fine if you’re just doing shots of the sky without a foreground, but if you’re capturing the foreground then it will blur in the star tracked exposures, so if you want a sharp foreground you’ll need a separate exposure (or more than one) of the foreground with the tracker turned off. I do this anyways even without a tracker so that I can get detail and low noise in my foreground. Blending the static foreground shot with the star tracker shot would require dealing with blending the blurred foreground of the star tracker shot with the sharp foreground of the static shot. So, the blending gets more complex.
Also, there is no real benefit to a star tracker for wide angle astro shots. Stacking 20 shots of 10 seconds each will result in essentially the same image as if you had taken a single shot for 200 seconds with a tracker (20 shots x 10 seconds = 200 seconds). The stacking shots combine to produce the accumulated shutter speed (amount of light hitting the sensor). The benefits of a tracker are when you are using long lenses and shooting deep space objects that require the camera to move in order for the object to stay within the field of view of the long focal length.

What is Star Stacking?

Star stacking is a method of overlaying multiple night sky exposures of the same composition, aligning the images so the stars all line up between each exposure, then averaging the brightness & color values of those exposures, producing a result with far less noise than a single exposure. The noise differs between each exposure, and even from pixel to pixel in the same exposure the noise differences can be high, so the averaging process greatly reduces that variation, resulting in a much smoother sky.
You can extend this to get pinpoint stars by using a short enough shutter speed for your given focal length so that the stars do not appear to move in the frame. So you get the best of both worlds, pinpoint stars and low noise.

Low Noise Foreground

The star stacking method reduces noise in the entire image, not just the sky. Even though the sky is aligned separately from the foreground in the stacking process, the foreground area can still be stacked and averaged to reduce noise. Depending on the ambient light of the scene, this might mean that you don’t need to do any separate foreground exposures to get a foreground that has detail and is in focus with low noise. But, where I’m often shooting, this isn’t normally the case. I still will take separate foreground exposures at a lower ISO (normally ISO 1600), for longer shutter speeds (usually multiple minutes per exposure), and when needed I will change focus and take multiple foreground shots to get everything in focus.
In the image above you can see how stacking greatly reduces the noise in the foreground part of the image. The star stacked result is significantly cleaner and has more detail. However, the foreground is still too dark and too noisy because there simply just isn’t enough light collected from the foreground in 10 seconds, and while stacking cleans it up, it can’t bring out more detail that wasn’t captured in the first place. So I would take another exposure at ISO 1600 for several minutes, and blend that cleaner, brighter result with the star stacked result of the sky.

Exposure Settings for Star Stacking

Shutter Speed

Pick a shutter speed that will capture pinpoint stars with the focal length of the lens you are using. There is a complex formula that can be used to calculate this with respect to your location on earth, the direction your camera is pointing, your focal length, and the size of the photosites on your camera’s sensor, but an easier way is to use the “150 rule” (something I sort of made up, see below), or just start with half of the shutter speed you normally use that is generating noticeable star trails. Take a test shot and then zoom in on the LCD preview and see how the stars look. If they appear to be pinpoints, then try a longer exposure until they start to trail and go back from that, the goal is to find the longest possible exposure before the stars trail.
You may have heard of the “500 rule”, which is a simple way of determining your shutter speed for the stars so they don’t trail too much. You take your focal length (or the 35mm equivalent if you’re shooting on a crop sensor) and divide that into 500 to get the shutter speed. However, I find this rule to be far too sloppy, usually resulting in distractingly long star trails. If you’re looking for reasonable star trails and aren’t star stacking, try dividing into 400 or 300 instead.
LandscapeStacker
For pinpoint stars, try dividing into 150 and then adjust from there to find the best shutter speed. For example, if you’re using a full frame camera with a 14mm lens, then 150 / 14 = 10.7 seconds, so I round down to 10 seconds. For 50mm, that would be 150 / 50 = 3 seconds, which may sound extremely short, but isn’t so bad if you have an f/1.4 lens. At f/1.4, you’re 1 stop away from f/2, and 2 stops away from f/2.8. Using the same shutter speed, going up an f-stop cuts the light in half, and going down an f-stop doubles the amount of light. So to capture the same amount of light when you increase your f-stop, you have to double your shutter speed. So, a 3 second shot at f/1.4 captures the same amount of light as a 6 second shot at f/2, or a 12 second shot at f/2.8.
Ultimately, just find the right shutter speed for your setup. Start with a shutter speed from one of the above methods and keep adjusting and testing from that point.

ISO

Generally speaking, you’ll need an ISO of 3200 or greater for star shots. The actual ISO you can use will depend on the amount of ambient light, your shutter speed, and your camera’s high ISO performance. Using a Nikon D5 or D850, I generally have no issue shooting as high as ISO 10,000 or 12,800 for night sky shots, but you also need to make sure you keep it low enough to avoid blowing out the stars.
In some cameras, if you’re star stacking with shutter speeds of around 10 seconds or less and your lens has strong vignetting at the aperture you’re using, you could end up with very strong magenta color noise issues along the edges of the frame when you apply vignette correction in your raw editor, which brightens the dark edges, revealing the color noise. This happens because the amount of light hitting the edges, in particular the corners, of the frame is much less than the amount of light hitting the center of the frame due to the vignetting of the lens, and if the light level is dark enough then you’re not overcoming the amplification/circuitry noise of the sensor and camera, so boosting the dark areas shows that noise. The solution here is to use a low enough ISO to prevent or at least minimize the amplification noise. Try ISO 3200 or less if you are experiencing this. If you can’t get rid of it, you can leave in the vignetting, or you can color correct the magenta fringing. An example of this issue and the solution is shown in my complete Milky Way photography editing workflow video tutorial.

F-Stop

You want to use the brightest (lowest f-stop number) aperture possible on your lens while still getting sharp stars. If you see coma distortion of your stars or general star flare, try stopping down a little bit at a time until it goes away or is minimized. You may have to live with some amount (or a lot) of coma distortion depending on your lens.

Number of Exposures & Intervalometer

Star stacking requires capturing multiple shots at the same shutter speed so that they can be aligned and averaged later. The more shots you have, the less noisy the star stacked result will be, but only up to a point before sensor pattern noise starts being visible, or you completely exhaust the signal to noise ratio.
In general, I’ve found 10 exposures to be plenty to give a result with very low noise. I’ve done as much as 20, but sensor pattern noise starts to become an issue around there. But even 5 stacked exposures will make a big difference in noise. Experiment and see what works for you.
You can take the shots manually by just hitting the shutter button multiple times, but a much easier way is to use an intervalometer that can be programmed to shoot X amount of shots at Y seconds each. Some cameras, like many of the full frame Nikons, have a built in intervalometer that can be used, or you can get an external remote/intervalometer. I love the Promote, but the Vello Shutterboss or Neewer intervalometers work well, but note that almost any intervalometer seems to have an issue with cable reliability. I used to use the Shutterboss as my primary remote, but I went through 3 of them in a year because the cables kept breaking. The Promote has replaceable cables, and I’ve gone through a few of them, but in the long run the Promote is cheaper than continuing to buy less expensive remotes. Just make sure you get the correct remote (or cable) for you camera. Use the Nikon 10-pin connection for pro full frame Nikons that support the 10-pin connection, other Nikons (including some full frames) need the USB cable. There are separate cables for Sony, Canon, etc.

Example Settings for Star Stacking

Here are some example exposure settings for star stacking at various focal lengths. ISO 3200 or higher would normally be used for all of these. On my Nikon D850, I’m often using ISO 6400 or higher. Remember that you need to take several exposures for star stacking, at least 5, but I normally take 10.
Stacker
Focal length: 14mm
Shutter speed: 6 seconds
Focal length: 50mm

Star Stacking Software

Star stacking isn’t anything new, pure astrophotographers (space images without a landscape) have been doing this for a long time, and use programs such as Deep Sky Stacker, among many others, to do the stacking. But landscape astrophotography requires the alignment of the stars in the exposures to happen without the static foreground objects messing up the alignment. This can be done manually in Photoshop, but there are a couple of software programs that are designed for star stacking with landscape astrophotographs, and they make the process much, much easier.

Mac: Starry Landscape Stacker

Starry Landscape Stacker is the program I use, it is incredibly good at automatically finding the stars to make a mask for the sky, so that the foreground is not included in the alignment process. You can help the program find the sky by adding red dots that indicate where the sky boundary is located, and you can fine tune the auto generated mask with a paintbrush. Starry Landscape Stacker has some other great features, like letting you pick which frame to align with, this is great for when you want to align the stars to a particular frame where the stars are situated nicely against the foreground. Believe it or not, the stars will move enough in the 100 seconds (10 seconds x 10 exposures, or however long your stacking is) such that this is a very handy feature.
Starry Landscape Stacker is available in the Mac App Store, and a free trial is available that has all the features but outputs images with a watermark.
You can read more about it here, and Ralph Hill, the author of Starry Landscape Stacker, has a great collection of video tutorials on how to use the program here.

Windows: Sequator

I do not have any experience with Sequator, but it is the star stacking program available for Windows that can deal with landscape foreground masking, like Starry Landscape Stacker above.

Starry Landscape Stacker Mac Starry Landscape Stacker Trial Download

Sequator is free and available here, and this is a good video walk-though of Sequator.

Photoshop

Star stacking with landscape foregrounds can be done in Photoshop, but it is a tedious pain, and in my past experience Photoshop sometimes fails to align all the stars, particularly towards the edges of the frames. You can learn how to do it via example in my Milky Way photography editing workflow video, or with Lonely Speck’s video, but I strongly suggest using one of the programs above instead.

Starry Landscape Stacker

Blending Sky and Foreground

After you complete the star stacking steps, you can take the resulting noise-reduced sky image and blend it in Photoshop with foreground exposures from the same scene to produce your final image that will have the entire scene well exposed, sharp, and with low noise from the foreground to the stars. I cover the basics of this in my Milky Way photography editing workflow video tutorial.

Practice!

Now that you know what star stacking is all about and how to do it, head out on the next clear moonless night and give it a try! Figure out the best shutter speeds for your favorite focal lengths, and practice with one of the software tools mentioned above.
Happy Shooting!

Astrophotography is closer to science than art, and there is no such thing as “getting it right in camera.” This means you cannot simply point the camera at the sky and snap away.

In astrophotography you cannot avoid post processing your images, so stacking and editing your images serves three main purposes:

  1. Reduce noise and deal with light gradients and vignetting.
  2. Improve signal to noise ratio.
  3. Reveal the faint details in the image.

Image stacking is the technique used to improve the signal to noise ratio, and it is the only noise reduction method that will boost the image details rather than smear them out.

In this article, we will discuss some of the most popular software available for astrophotography image stacking.

Note: Don’t miss the detailed video at the end of this article, It was created to help show you how to quickly start using some of the stacking software mentioned in this article.
Click here to skip to our Image Stacking Demo Video.

What Does Stacking Photos Mean?

The concept behind image stacking is simple, but to appreciate how it works, there are a couple of things we have to consider:

  1. A stack can be visualized as a pile of images all stacked one on top of the other;
  2. Each digital image is formed by a set of pixels, all having a certain value: dark pixels will have a lower value than the bright ones;

In the simplest form of image stacking, the pixels values for all images in the stack are averaged to produce a single image.

What is the purpose of stacking photos?

The result is a single image with improved signal to noise ratio, i.e., with better details and lower (random) digital noise and better details.

The scheme below illustrates the concept.

If the considered digital noise affects the pixel values randomly across the stack, then the result of averaging the stack is that the random component of the noise to the pixel value is significantly reduced.

ISO noise and Luminance noise and Chrominancenoise are examples of digital noises that are random.

The image below shows a real-life example from stacking 30 images from my Sony RX10 bridge camera taken at ISO 6400. As you can see, the original images showed a greater deal of noise (grain) than the stacked one.

The More Images You Stack, The Better

The more images you stack, the cleaner the resulting images are, as shown in the comparison below.

While Image stacking creates a cleaner image, it often softens the image: digital sharpening techniques are then used to recover sharp looking details.

Finally, bear in mind that the progression of image quality is not linear.

If stacking 4 images improves the image quality of 50% respect what you got by stacking only 2 images, to improve a further 50% the image quality from stacking 50 images, you may need to stack 300 images or more.

Image Stacking And Movement

If nothing moves between shots, like in the previous real life example, implementing image stacking is very simple: just group the images and average them to smooth out the noise.

With a moving subject, grouping and averaging the images will not only smooth out the noise, but also the subject itself.

This is the same principle for which long exposures of passing traffic and crowd result in a street image without cars nor people.

This effect is amplified with the number of images used, and the moving subject could simply disappear from the stacked image.

To resolve the issue, you have to align the images based on their content before stacking.

Starry landscape stacker mac starry landscape stacker serial photog

Due to image alignment, you may have to trim the edges of the stacked image to get rid of artifacts, but your target will not be lost.

Note that while in theory you can stack images of a static scene taken with the camera on a tripod, in reality, those images will probably differ at the pixel scale due to micro-movements. It is always beneficial to align the images before stacking.

How To Shoot For Exposure Stacking Your Images

Image stacking can be done with any camera and even camera phones and with images in both RAW and JPEG format.

Nonetheless, some things can be done to improve the final result:

  1. Lock the focus, so that the camera will not hunt for it between images. This will also help to keep the focus consistent through the shooting sequence.
  2. Keep the same settings, in particular shutter speed, aperture, and focal length: you don’t want to change the camera field of view during the sequence, nor the brightness of the images or the depth of field.
  3. If you are shooting on a tripod, disable image stabilization. If you want to shoot handheld, do so only for short sequences at very high shutter speed.

Image Stacking In Astrophotography

Related:Astrophotography Software & Tools Resource List

As said previously, image stacking is a standard technique implemented in any astrophotography editing workflow for,

  1. A star field from a fixed tripod.
  2. A deep sky object from a tracking mount.
  3. The Moon handheld.
  4. A starry landscape from a fixed tripod or tracking mount.

Every astronomy image will benefit from image stacking.

List Of Photo Stacking Software For Astrophotography

Here is a list of software used in astrophotography for image stacking.

Adobe Photoshop

Complete Image Editor | Commercial – Subscription Plan Photography Bundle $9.99 / Month | Mac OS X, Windows

Pro

  • Versatile
  • Available for Mac and Windows
  • In bundle with Adobe Lightroom CC, Bridge, Camera Raw, and web space
  • Many action packs and plugins available for astrophotography

Cons

  • Subscription Plan only
  • Can’t be used to calibrate light frames
  • Stacking capabilities are somehow limited

If you are interested in photography, chances are you know Adobe Photoshop is the standard in the industry and does not need introductions.

With Adobe implementing a subscription plan for their applications, if you are using Lightroom CC for your everyday photography, your plan subscription will also include Photoshop CC and Bridge CC.

And for astrophotography, Photoshop is what you need. Lightroom cannot stack your images nor perform the histogram stretching, two crucial steps in the editing workflow for astrophotography.

In this article, we have already covered in detail how to stack astrophotography images with Photoshop.

Sequator

Deep Sky And Starry Landscape Stacker | Freeware | Windows

Pro

  • Free
  • Easy to use
  • Fast
  • Suitable for both Starry Landscapes and Deep Sky images
  • Can create Star Trails

Cons

  • Windows only
  • Limited set of options
  • Not suitable for Planetary astrophotography

Sequator is an easy-to-use and intuitive astrophotography software for stacking both starry landscape and deep-sky images. It can also be used to create star trails.

While not as advanced as other stackers, it nonetheless allows you to calibrate your light frames with dark and flat calibration frames. It also allows you to remove light pollution, reduce noise, and perform other simple tasks on the stacked image.

Starry Landscape Stacker

Starry Landscape Stacker | Commercial, $39.99 | Mac OS X

Pro

  • Fast
  • Easy to use

Cons

  • Mac Os X only
  • Does not read RAW files

If you are into starry landscapes and you are a Mac user, Starry Landscape Stacker is a must-have.

Easy to use, it allows you to stack and align the sky and the foreground independently by letting you easily mask the sky.

Unfortunately, the software lacks the support for RAW formats, thus forcing you to convert your RAW images in the more heavy TIFF format.

Aside from that, it works very fast and the final image is of good quality. You can also save the sky only, which is useful to further edit the shot in Photoshop or similar editors.

Starry Sky Stacker

Deep Sky Stacker | Commercial, $24.99 | Mac OS X

Starry Landscape Stacker Mac Starry Landscape Stacker Mac

Pro

  • Fast
  • Easy to use

Cons

  • Mac Os X only
  • Does not read RAW files
  • Basic

Starry Sky Stacker is Starry Landscape Stacker brother and it has been created to stack deep sky astrophotography images.

As Starry Landscape Stacker, Starry Sky Stacker is very easy to use and intuitive, although very basic.

If you are a casual star shooter and a Mac user, this could be a good choice for you.

Deep Sky Stacker

Deep Sky Stacker | Freeware | Windows

Pro

  • Free
  • Easy to use
  • Fast
  • Full light frames calibration
  • Features Comet stack modes
  • Can Drizzle
  • Many advanced stack options and methods available
Stacker

Cons

  • Windows only
  • Post-processing is quite limited
  • Not suitable for Starry Landscapes nor for Planetary astrophotography

Deep Sky Stacker, better known as DSS, is arguably one of the most widely used software to calibrate and stack astrophotography images.

With DSS, you can fully calibrate your images with Darks, Flats, Dark Flats, and Bias calibration frames for the best results possible. Light frames are analyzed and scored by quality so that you can decide which percentage of best images you can stack (Best 75% by default).

A very interesting feature is that with DSS, you can easily combine images taken during different imaging sessions, to produce images of higher quality.

Autostakkert!

Planetary Stacker | Freeware | Windows

Pro

  • Free
  • Easy to use
  • Suitable for Planetary, Lunar and Solar images
  • Stack full planetary disk and lunar surface close-ups

Cons

  • Interface a bit confused
  • It does not offer wavelet sharpening
  • Windows only

Autostakkert!, also known as AS!, is a very popular free software among the solar system astrophotographers. With AS! it is easy to stack both images showing the full Planetary (or Lunar or Solar) disc and images showing lunar surface close-ups.

The interface is a bit confusing, particularly in the beginning, but it is easy to navigate through the different steps for the stacking.

Unfortunately, AS! does not offer wavelet sharpening, which is a widely used technique in planetary and lunar astrophotography. For this, you can load your stacked image in Registax, another freeware software for Windows only that, sadly, is now “abandoned-ware.”

Lynkeos

Planetary Stacker | Freeware | Mac OS X

Pro

  • Free
  • Has deconvolution and wavelet sharpening
  • It is probably the only freeware planetary stacker for Mac OS X

Cons

  • Not very intuitive
  • Somewhat slower than Autostakkert!

Lynkeos is perhaps the only freeware planetary stacker software for Mac OS X, sparing you from turning to Windows for using Autostakkert!.

The interface is quite intuitive to navigate, but not when it comes to performing the different tasks.

On the other hand, it offers a deconvolution method and wavelet sharpening, a must-have for a planetary stacker. Definitely worth having a look at it if you are a Mac user.

SiriL

Deep Sky Astrophotography Editor | Freeware | Mac OS X, Windows, Linux

Pro

  • Free
  • Cross-Platform
  • Active development

Cons

  • A bit convoluted and not as intuitive as other stackers

SiriL is a freeware, cross-platform, astrophotography package that will let you calibrate, stack, and develop deep sky astrophotography images.

While not as easy and intuitive as Sequator or DSS, it offers a lot of options and produces good results. There is an active community, and it is under constant development.

Astro Pixel Processor

Deep Sky Astrophotography Editor | Commercial $60/Yr Renter License Or $150 Owner License | Mac OS X, Windows, Linux

Pro

  • Full-grown astrophotography package
  • Fairly easy to use
  • Mosaics are created with ease and are of great quality
  • Active and constant development
  • Cross-Platform
  • 30-days Trial period
  • Affordable yearly subscription

Cons

  • Only for deep sky astrophotography
  • No Comet stacking mode

Starry Landscape Stacker Mac

With Astro Pixel Processor (APP), you step in the realm of full-grown astrophotography packages, with many advanced options and methods to calibrate, stack, and post-process your deep-sky images.

Compared to PixInsight (PI), the software benchmark for the category, APP is cheaper and way easier to use, which makes it one of the best PI alternatives.

If you decide to buy it, you can choose between the renter’s license for $60/yr, to always get the latest version of APP, or the owner’s license for $150, but you will have to purchase the license again for major update releases.

PixInsight

Astrophotography Editor | Commercial – €230+VAT | Mac OS X, Windows, Linux

Pro

  • It has all you need for astrophotography
  • 45 days trial period
  • A lot of tutorials and information available

Cons

  • Expensive and without subscription plan
  • Extremely steep learning curve
  • Long and convoluted process
  • Needs a powerful computer

When it comes to astrophotography, PixInsight is the software of reference against which all others are measured. It offers everything you may possibly need to produce pro graded images, and it is objectively the best software in the field.

But user experience can be frustrating, as the learning curve is very steep, the editing is long and convoluted, and your computer must be quite recent and powerful to make it run smoothly.

The €230 + VAT price tag is also quite steep: sure it is worth every penny, but this makes PI be even more the software of choice for professional and keen amateur astrophotographers.

A Comprehensive Demo About Image Stacking

In this video, I show you how easy it is to wet our feet with image stacking.

This is particularly true if you use Starry Landscape Stacker, Sequator, Deep Sky Stacker and Autostakkert!, as I showed in the video below.

Conclusion

Image stacking is one of the crucial steps in the astrophotography editing workflow.

You’ll need the appropriate stacker for each type of astrophotography: starry landscapes, star trails, or deep-sky and planetary images.

In this article, we have covered the most popular astrophotography stackers available on the market, both freeware and commercial.

And while Windows users have the more extensive choice, some notable stackers are available for Mac and even Linux users.