When I started Astrophotography my process for stacking images was to utilize Deep Sky Stacker. It was free, simple to use and fast. Over the past few weeks however as I started using Pixinsight I thought I would try the stacking process they offer.

Pixinsight is much more involved and takes much longer than deep sky stacker does. The process for stacking involves multiple steps. But as with most things in life you get out of it what you put into it. I was interested in doing a comparison between the two with the same set of data to see the difference.

This video shows the process, and also the results. Deep Sky Stacker does seem to produce a more noisy image, I see banding and background noise that doesn’t seem present on the pixinsight image. After stacking and a basic stretch the Deep Sky Stacker image shows more color but is just too noisy. Even the amp glow has not been dealt with. It is almost as if deep sky tacker is ignoring my calibration frames 9although it’s not because I see them being processed in the logs).

The Nebulousity just seems smoother and less noisy with Pixinsight. The weight batch pre processing that grades each image, the algorithm that discards the “bad” exposures, automatic color calibration and so on that Pixinishgt does during the stacking process give us a much better starting point for further processing.

So from now on I will be doing all my stacking in Pixinisight, even if it does take longer!

Here’s the final output from Pixinsight and Photoshop. This Nebula needs a lot more integration time to reduce the noise still, but the object of this exercise was more to compare the stacking results rather than produce a final finished image.