Image Stacking

Note to Self

A brief sum­ma­ry of how I stack images.

• snap the light frames
• snap the dark frames, ie, leave the set­tings the same and put the lens cap on
• cre­ate a mas­ter dark frame (merge the dark frames in Gnu IMP—“darken only” lay­er mode)
• do dark frame sub­trac­tion on every light frame (composite IMG_{xxxx}.JPG -compose minus_dst dark-frame-master.jpg IMG_{xxxx}_cleaned.JPG should help)
• align images with align_image_stack -a aligned_ *.JPG
• con­vert aligned images to JPG using mogrify -format jpg *.tif (most­ly so I don’t over­load my poor laptop)
• open aligned images as lay­ers in Gnu IMP
• set each lay­er mode as “Dodge”^[1]These 2 steps can also be replaced by using the Gnu IMP “cre­ate star­trails” script
• export the whole she­bang as a JPG
• re-open the export­ed JPG
• Use Gnu IMP’s Fil­ter → Enhance → Noise Reduc­tion and cranked that baby up to 11^[2]16, actu­al­ly
• prof­it