Seestar S50 new mosaic / framing mode stacking - registration takes very long time

Hi,  SeeStar owner here and I have been experimenting with mosaic stacking for a little over a month now.  I am not an APP expert at all but I have gotten fairly good results through trial and error.  The SeeStar shoots mosaics in a spiral pattern and not panels like most people use for mosaics.  Here are a couple of suggestions for the settings.  Under #4, Registration Mode, use "Normal" and not "Mosaic."  The first time I tried it under Mosaic and it ran all day/night and barely made a dent.  What you want to do is under #6 Integrate, change the composition mode to "Full."  Also under #6, check Multi-Band Blending (Enable MBB) and move the slider to 10-15%.  Changing this should help.  Recently I have started to use the "Multi Session" options (Check the box in #1 - Load).  For this I load all the subs, regardless of when taken of the Lights and check the box for "Session 1."  Then I load the SeeStar produced stacked Fit and set it separately as Session 2.  You then need to Run #3 Analyze stars first and let it process.  At the end of Star Analysis, under the list of Frames and File names, scroll until you see the name of the SeeStar produced stack fit file and right click the file and select "set reference," then move on to register.  After the Registration, you will likely get a failed message for a couple of subs and APP will suggest using their reference frame, decline it and then move to #5 Normalize and select "Advanced" as the mode, then move to Integrate.  Under Integrate, at the top, the drop down for "Multi Session Options, I select "Integrate per session."  This will integrate all of Session 1 using the Seestar Stacked Fit as the reference but will not integrate the reference file with the others.  It will also produce a second image of just the Reference File, which I will delete.  I found that integrate the SeeStar Stack adds a reddish tent to the final image so I do it separately.  This is still a slow process and yesterday it took about 5 hours to integrate a M45 mosaic of 6900 subs.  APP will also create a massive file at the end of the integration (could be 1-4 TB in size) but it will delete it at the end and leave you with ~200 GB stacked file.  If you don't have space, lower the Scale # at the bottom of the integrate tab.  I hope this helps, good luck.

@brannonqgmail-com thanx a bunch for an extremely detailed answer! I'll give it a go and post results 😎

@brannonqgmail-com running it now, and the registration process took 3 mins compared to probably 24 hours 😶  Let's see how the integration goes, iteration 1 now

@brannonqgmail-com these are my integration settings. Any other good advice for the best possible result from Seestar data?

Outside of those settings I suggested, everything else is default 

@brannonqgmail-com thanx again. Have you been playing around with scale, droplet and Bayer/X-trans drizzle with seestar data and gotten any good result?

Btw, iteration 2 already now 🙂

Process finished now, with lnc 2 and 3 iterations. Thanx for your help!

5 min stretch in Siril below, but I think it should be possible to get some good data 🙂

Glad it worked out!   I usually leave scale at 1 and droplet size at 1.   I integrate on a 4TB SSD and have had to lower the scale to .7 for larger integrations because I got a warning I did not have enough space.  

@brannonqgmail-com thanx for helping me out yesterday. Saved my day! I've been using this workflow for several sessions now, and works perfect every time.

I have one more question though, that you might have quick answer to: I've been imaging the Wizard nebula over several nights, so I have several sets of subs. I really want to integrate these to a big stack, but with this workflow where the option "integrate per session" is set, it will result in several resulting fits to exclude the reference frame. So my question is: what's the best practice for combining all sessions except the reference frame? I guess it will be either by adding all imaging sessions to session 1, then reference frame to session 2, or by stacking the resulting session fits (and how to do that the best way of doing that) except the reference?

Thanx in advance!

Posted by: @davidlysnes-no

↑

I guess it will be either by adding all imaging sessions to session 1, then reference frame to session 2

This is how I do it, I add every light (over multiple nights) and always choose Session 1.  Then I add the reference frame and choose Session 2 and Check Integrate by Session.  For Session 1, all your lights will be integrated using the Reference frame but it will not stack the reference frame.  Session 2 will only be the Reference frame which I will delete.

@brannonqgmail-com thanx for replying! So option 1 then, adding all subs from different nights to session 1, then the reference as session 2. Very well, I'll give that a go too. There will be different light pollution etc over time, but hopefully LNC will solve that anyway by running a few iterations.

Thanx again 🙂

@davidlysnes-no This is what I really like a about APP vs PI stacking, you can throw everything together and it works: different nights, LP filter on, LP Filter off, different exposures, etc.

@brannonqgmail-com indeed, definitively worth every penny. Looking forward to LNC being multithreaded too. Got a reply back from Mabula early October that they're currently working on spreading it to more threads.

A good scripting engine would be nice too, but for now I'm really happy with APP. Haven't even considered PI yet after the trial 😉