The user interface of DeepSkyStacker is quite simple and intuitive and all the main features and commands are readily available.

The user interface is divided into two areas:
To the left a set of tabs gives access to all the commands and features.
To the right a screen depending of the current tab that is used to configure and view.

To change the current tab you can click anywhere in the tab.

From this tab, you can add frame of each type (light, dark, flat and offset/bias) to the list, save and restore File Lists, preview images and start the registering or stacking process

The right area contains the Pictures List and the Picture Preview.
On the bottom of the picture list a line of tabs gives access to each file group. If you click on one group tab the files of the group are shown in the list.
To know more about the file groups you can consult the technical details here.

To the top and the right a slider may be use to change the gamma of the previewed image which may be useful to view faint objects.
Of course no modification is made to the real image as it is only a previewing trick.

Before the stacking process a screen recapitulates the different steps.
It is important to know that the light frames will be automatically associated with their dark frames using ISO speed and exposure time.
Flat frames and Offset/Bias frames will be automatically associated regarding only the ISO speed.
In each case the best matching frames will be proposed and a warning will be issued if ISO speed and/or exposure time are not matching.

From this dialog you can also change the stacking methods for each type of picture by clicking directly on the link or on the 'Stacking Parameters' button.

A new dialog is then opened, from which you can modify the folder into which are created the temporary files needed by the stacking process and all the settings controlling the stacking process.

The first tab is used to set the stacking mode among which the possibility to use a Custom Rectangle.
You should note that in all modes the offsets are computed from the reference frame, so it's not a true mosaic mode but a pseudo mosaic.

This is also where you can choose the Drizzle option when stacking.

The other light, dark, flat and bias tabs are used to modify the stacking method for each type of frame, and to activate the background calibration option for the light frames or the automatic detection and removal of hot pixels and bad columns detection and removal for the dark frames.

The Alignment tab may be used to change the alignment method used to align light frames.

You can choose Bilinear, Bisquared or Bicubic transformation or you can DeepSkyStacker select the best transformation based on the number of available stars.

This tab is used to control the creation of intermediate files.
Two options may be used to create files containing intermediate images:
The first option may be use to create a file containing the calibrated image for each light frame.
The second option may be used to create a file containing the calibrated and registered image for each light frame.
The created files have the name and location of the matching light frame with a .cal.tif or .cal.fts extension for the calibrated images and .reg.tif or .reg.fts extension for the registered and calibrated images.
The files are always uncompressed TIFF or FITS files, monochrome or color, 8, 16 or 32 bit depending of the light frame bit depth.

This tab is to control the way the calibrated images are cleaned before stacking.

The goal is to detect and clean remaining hot or cold pixels after calibration.

Checking these options may seriously alter the resulting image so use them with caution.

Two parameters are needed to define the behavior of the cosmetic cleaning.

The first parameter is the size of the filter used to detect and fix the hot/cold pixels. The larger the filter, the longer the processing time and the smoother the resulting image.

The second parameter is the threshold under which no correction is done (the pixel value remain the same).
A lower threshold means that more correction are done.

The last option may be checked to create an image showing the cleaned pixels for each light frame.
In this image, cleaned hot pixels are white, cleaned cold pixels are dark gray and all the other pixels are light gray.
The created files have the name and location of the matching light frame with a .cosmetic.tif or .cosmetic.fts extension as defined in the previous tab.

The Comet tab is available only when at least two light frames (including the reference light frame) have a comet registered.

In this case the Comet tab is used to select the comet stacking mode between the 3 available modes.
See the Comet Stacking topic in the Technical Details for information on how to use Comet Stacking.

For example it may be used to create the resulting images from the red, green, blue and luminance images without the need to load each list then start manually the stacking process for each one.
Of course it also may be used to stack any existing list.
You just need to add the file lists previously created by the Save File List command to the list.
Each File List that is checked will be processed.

At the end of the stacking process, the output file name replaces the list name for each processed file list.

Notes:

• It is not possible to define a custom rectangle for batch stacking.

I would like to remind here that DeepSkyStacker only allows simple processing treatments of the resulting picture in order to quickly view the result of the stacking process.
The heavy post processing should take place in another more specialized software.

The processing tab contains a preview of the RGB histogram and three sub tabs which are used to adjust the following settings::
- RGB levels
- Luminance curve
- Saturation
RGB levels and luminance curve adjustments are directly visible on the RGB histogram.

The RGB levels adjustments are controlled by:
The kind a adjustment that you can modify by clicking on the adjustment name. The available adjustments are linear, square root, cubic root, logarithm, log(log), log(square root) and asinh..
The modifiable limits for each channel (left cursor for the minimum, right cursor for the maximum).
The modifiable offset for each channel (middle cursor).
The RGB levels adjustment may be done independently for each channel or for all the channels at the same time when the 'Linked settings' option is checked..

The luminance curve is controlled by 6 parameters.
- 2 for the darkness area.
- 2 for the midtone area
- 2 for the highlight area.
These parameters are controlling a Bezier curve used to transform the luminance.
Simply put the parameters are the angle and power of the curve for each point.
The advantage of using only 6 parameters is that on one hand it is possible to quickly view the result and on the other hand that it is possible to memorize the parameters to apply them on another picture.

The RGB histogram is used to visualize for each channel (R, G and B) the red, green and blue pixels distribution in the picture.
The black curve is the luminance adjustment curve.
Moreover, to help the equalization of the channels the Gaussian curve for each channel is drawn on top of the histogram.

DeepSkyStacker can save the resulting image as 16 or 32 bit TIFF or FITS files using two methods::
- by applying the adjustments
- by not applying the adjustments (but storing them in the case of the TIFF file in order to continue the post processing the next time the image is loaded by DeepSkyStacker).

What is a star mask?
A star mask is a synthetic grayscale image on which each bright enough star is replaced by a round white area which is fading to black following a curve.
You can see an example of a star mask on the right.
Mouse over the text to see the image or the star mask.

Star Field

Star Mask Creation
To create a Star Mask you must load an image in the processing tab.

Then just click on the Create Star Mask... menu on the right and the dialog on the right will open.

From there you can change the shape of the stars in the mask, the star detection threshold and a few other parameters.

Once you are done, just click on the OK button and you will be asked to select a file (either a TIFF or a FITS file) in which the star mask will be saved.

The saved file is always a grayscale 16 bit image. It is not automatically loaded by DeepSkyStacker.

The star mask is always created from the image as you see it in DeepSkyStacker which means with the current adjustments applied.

You can select multiple files in the list.
A context menu is available (mouse right button) to manually select the reference frame of the stack, change the file type, check or uncheck the files, remove the files from the picture list or view, edit the properties of the files copy the list content to the clipboard or definitively erase files from the disk.

The properties dialog may be used to change the picture type, and temporarily (only for the current session) the ISO speed and exposure time of one or more pictures.
When changing the ISO speed and exposure time, no change is made to the real files. The values are only stored in memory for the duration of the current session.

When a light frame is selected in the registering and stacking tab it is possible:

• To edit the star positions: Stars detected by DeepSkyStacker will be coloured green. You can select extra stars or deselect the ones DeepSkyStacker detected by left clicking with the mouse.
• To create and edit (move/resize) a custom rectangle

You can select one of the above modes using the toolbar in the bottom right corner of the image.

The last item of the toolbar is used to save the changes.

When used from the processing tab, the picture preview may be used to select a part of the image by drawing a rectangle directly on the picture.

This rectangle is used on one hand to apply the adjustments only to this rectangle and on the other hand, optionally, to save only a part of the image.

If no rectangle is defined the adjustments are applied to the full image.

In all the cases, when the image is saved to disk the adjustments are applied to the full image.

RAW Files

The parameters are:

The Color Adjustment is applied after the White Balance adjustments for Daylight White Balance (the default) or Camara White Balance (if selected). The white balance adjustment values are extracted from the RAW files by LibRaw Copyright © 2008-2019 LibRaw LLC. LibRaw is based upon the original DCRaw decoder for RAW files written by Dave Coffin. Use Auto White Balance is no longer supported.
The values for the Red and Blue scales are relative to the Green.
The luminance adjustment applies to all three channels.

More information about the interpolation mode and the specific behavior of the Bayer matrix optimization, is available in the technical details.

FITS Files

The only setting in this tab used for all FITS files is the Brightness value.
It may be used to scale up 12 bit images to 16 bits images (use a value of 16 to do so).

All the other settings are only used with 16 bit B&W FITS files created by a DSLR or a color CCD camera.
The first step is to select the DSLR or the CCD camera used to take the images from the list. This is necessary to use the correct Bayer Filter Pattern that will be used to decode the image transforming them from B&W to color images.

The parameters are:
- balance of the RGB channels
- interpolation mode
About the channels balance it is important to enter the values used by your DSLR or CCD camera.
The values for the Red and Blue scales are relative to the Green.
The luminance adjustment applies to all three channels.

More information about the interpolation mode and the specific behavior of the Bayer matrix optimization is available in the technical details.