DeepSkyStacker

DeepSkyStacker is a portable software application designed for astro-photographers who want to seamlessly process deep sky pictures. It offers support for popular file types, including JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIFF and RAW images.

As far as the interface is concerned, DeepSkyStacker adopts a large window with a clear-cut structure, where you can open pictures from dark, flat, dark flat or offset/bias files. Alternatively, you can open a file list to easily cycle through pictures.

Any selected image can be used as the reference frame, as well as effortlessly converted to light, dark, dark flat, flat or offset/bias frame. Pictures can be registered by computing the offsets and stacked afterward. You can create star masks and adjust the star detection threshold, as well as reduce noise by applying a median filter.

The utility lets you tweak the levels for the red, green and blue channels, luminance (darkness, midtone, highlight), and saturation. When it comes to RAW images, you can use auto or camera white balance, select the Bayer matrix transformation mode between bilinear interpolation, AHD interpolation, Bayer Drizzle algorithm, and creating super pixels from the raw Bayer matrix. These are just part of the configuration settings supplied by DeepSkyStacker.

No error dialogs popped up in our tests, and the software program didn't freeze or crash. It had a good response time and low impact on PC performance, running on low CPU and RAM. DeepSkyStacker comes loaded with rich and advanced settings to help you process deep sky pictures.