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Hello,
one of my techniques to get smaller stars or to do HDR images like M42 is using two stacks with different exposure time and/or ISO settings. These are stacked separately and combined with layer masks in Photoshop.
For the two separate stacks to overlap perfectly, they have to use the same reference frame.
However, for a 30 seconds exposure at ISO 800 you don't wand to integrate the 4 minute ISO 1600 reference frame. So therefore I select a single long exposure light frame as the stacking reference, but unchecked it in the file list to be not included (in Deep Sky Stacker this works perfectly).
I tried this in APP, but I had a Java error during integration.
Maybe this was a single failure, but since integration takes quite a long time, I have not thried once more.
Should this theoretically work in APP?
Thanks!
Chris
Yes I think that can work, you can load all frames in and then going to tab 4) register. There you manually select the reference (top button). And then all the way down you save the registered frames.
It works. However, I only had good results by deselecting the reference frame after the Normalise step was completed. As far as I understand the frames are normalised with respect to the reference frame, so if that frame is not available it makes sense that APP gets confused 😉
It would be nice especially for cases like this that the alignement reference frame and normalisation reference frame could be separately selected.
BTW regarding speed: in order to test the impact of some of the settings I occasionally run the Integrate step at lower scale without LNC, this can be much faster than settings at full scale with many iterations for the LNC.
