Stacking 200 frames used to take me all night, now it's 15 minutes with the new software

Back in 2018 I was manually aligning each frame in DeepSkyStacker on my old laptop in Boise and it took 3 hours for one nebula, but now with the AI alignment in the latest version I just drop in the folder and grab a coffee, has anyone else's processing routine changed that drastically since they switched?

2 comments

2 Comments

fionat553d ago

My first stacked image was M51 from my driveway in 2016 and I spent four hours fighting gradient artifacts in Photoshop after DSS finished. I get why faster software is nice, but I've actually gone backwards on purpose lately. I still hand-check every subframe before stacking because one satellite trail or a bad guiding frame ruins a whole integration, and no AI can tell me which frames are worth keeping like my own eyes can. So yeah, the speed is great, but I'm not sure it's made my images better, just made me lazy about what goes into the stack.

tessap973d ago

...and honestly, the satellite trail thing is kind of the point. AI stacking tools don't just blindly average frames anymore, most of them flag and reject outliers like satellite streaks or planes before they even hit the stack. I get that you like eyeballing every frame, that's totally fair, but saying "no AI can tell me" is a little off. The rejection algorithms are literally built to spot those exact problems, they just don't have your personal taste for what looks good. They're not perfect, but they're way better than my tired eyes at 2am after three hours of fighting gradients.

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