Star Landscape Starry Landscape Stacker For Mac

Sure, dedicated astronomers have been using stacking software for years, but none were affordable or easy to use or most importantly… built for the mainstream user until Starry Landscape Stacker was released as an app for the mac.

I think we owe a lot of thanks to Ralph Hill who first released Starry Landscape Stacker back in 2012. We knew the value in capturing multiple exposures even if the capability to stack them wasn't quite there yet - so we continued shooting multiple exposures and watching closely for this capability to get better. I looked at a few options including Deep Sky Stacker, Registar, Photoshop and others but through about 2014, none of the options were effective, affordable, and easy to use. The result is significant noise reduction - although the software that does this is generally very expensive and overly complicated. This is where we take advantage of the fact that the location of the noise dots on each exposure is different and this allows us to sort of 'average' them together to get the noise dots to disappear where the points of light just reinforce each other.

There is a useful review of stacking apps on the Night Photography Workshop website.Astronomers have had some ability to 'stack' multiple exposures to reduce noise for years. Starry Landscape Stacker can also do dark frame subtraction and flat-field compensation to further improve the image accuracy. This produces a much better result than simple averaging and automatically removes airplanes and some other artifacts. Also, Starry Landscape Stacker does not simply average the images, it takes the median of the images after outlier elimination. Starry Landscape Stacker will do most of the work for you. You can do this with image processing tools like Photoshop, but it is a slow and tedious process. The difficulty with this is that the stars are moving relative to the ground so you must separate the sky from the ground and align the stars before averaging both the sky and ground portions of all the images. The basic idea is to take several images (at least 10, more is better) with a high ISO setting (up to ISO 3200) and short exposure time (< 20 sec) each one of which is noisy, and then average these images. The result is an image with stars as points and much less noise than you could achieve with a single exposure.

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 Landscape Stacker is a Mac app for making images of the night sky with stars as points and low-noise. Starry Landscape Stacker is also available in two bundles with my other stacking apps. You can purchase Starry Landscape Stacker from the Mac App Store or download a free trial. Made with Starry Landscape Stacker 1.5.0 from 23 light frames.Ĭanon 5DS, Canon 11-24mm f/4L USM, 11mm, f/4, ISO 12800, 15 sec, f/4

Star Landscape Starry Landscape Stacker For Mac