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I found this (free) stacking software in the internet. It promises to be easyer and faster than DeepSkyStacker and besides stacking has options for producing star trail images. And, what I find most interesting for star/nightscapes: they claim to have a freeze ground option that delivers pinpoint stars AND sharp terrestrial ground. Has anyboy experience with the software Sequator?
link: Sequator


Edit: and I found this Stacking App Review - Finding The Best Stackers ? Night Photography Workshop LLC test/description. Would be great if the stacker fixes landscape and stars in one pass - I will try.....


Another edit: Here is the manual: Manual - Sequator. If half of it would work fine it were a great help for my nightscapes.

Interesting Pete, checking it out now . . . .

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Great tip, I'll have to try it. Especially the light pollution filter. Many thanks for sharing.

Thanks Pete!! I just made use of it.

I saw your result in the other thread. To stack 1,300+ is impressive enough and to do it in 1/2 an hour is possybly a world record . The DSS and other software I have used in the past would either have resigned or needed lots of hours up to days to do the job.

I did not have much time to try the little peace of stacking program, just did some quick testing. It seems to be straight foreward and effective. The nightscape I tested resulted in a nice starfield with sharp stars and corrected wide-lens error (!). But the transit to the landscape was not clean, there were artefacts I did not like.

Stacking only the sky in a second test with the Rosette Nebula was impressively fast and delivered a very good result. This has to be compared to the result of i. e. DSS. There is no scoring before the Sequator begins with the stacking so the bad subs have to be sorted out manually before. The scoring is what I like very much in DSS. But there is a ruler in the Sequator programm to fine tune the sigma for rejecting bad pixels and the calculations are so fast that there is room for trial & error on the way to the best result.

What is great and what I will use for sure in future is that the programm offers a quick way to only deliver aligned images without stacking. So I can use the aligned subs as layers for stacking and retouching nightscapes in Photoshop manually.

I tried a 16 image stack first and that went pretty quick. Then based on that, decided to dump the entire lot in and let it churn for a while. I was actually surprised - but considering that it might take a day or two to chew through images.
I just used the suggested parameters from the article you linked to. That was a good start. I had run across the Mac only program several times previously, and wish that they would convert it to run under windows. I have not tried it on landscapes yet.
I have not considered this approach yet. For me it's still baby steps....

With some stars last night I could catch some light from M81 (Bodes Galaxy) and M82 (Cigar Galaxy). There were high clouds and I lost focus in the second half of the session without noticing it (due to temperature?). So the first pictures get a rating in DSS that is 5 times better than the last ones. I will have to improve the data in some other nights.


But I did a short comparison between the results of DSS and the Sequator. This is what come out of the stack of 30 x 300s @ ISO 400 Subs. Pics unstretched, just set the background to the same level::


DSS:



Sequator:




First conclusions:

- Sequator is multiple times faster - Sequator wins
- DSS delivers 32bit result - DSS wins. But the 16bit result of Sequator can be opend directly in pp-Software and is far more elaborated (pre-processed) - so ist a draw
- DSS offers way more options for everything - DSS wins, Sequator has more automations for "easy stacking" - another draw.
- Stars and heart of M81 become overexposed in Sequator, found no way to avoid that up to now - DSS wins.
- Resolution/detals/definition in galaxy is way better in Sequator - Sequator wins.
- Color in DSS are brownisch, hard to correct, bad color differentiation in M82 in DSS, Sequator much better - Sequator wins.


The result of the sequator is much better exept for the highlights that are way overexposed and burnt out. I will carry on testing and see what final results come out after I did my best in postprocessing.

And the direct comparison in two gifs.
Forgot to mention that I used the Pentax Objektiv HD DA AF-Konverter 1.4x AW for the first time with my 80/480 mm TS APO in this session. Looks promising!

I have tried Sequator as well, it seems to be working just fine, The Orion Belt (Horsehead nebula just visible) is 32min (89 frames) with my K-70 and the SMC M 200mm f4 lens, 'reduce pollution' is on in Sequator. Then 5 minutes post processing in Lightroom - I expect to be able to create a better result with PixInsight (trial expired),

In the end I could not get an acceptable result with DSS alone. So this is the final image as a combination of the DSS stack (for the stars and the heart of M81) and the Sequator stack. I processed the Sequator stack as good as I could and merged in the merely unprocessed DSS stack with a star mask to get back the blown out stars that Sequator had produced. So this is 90% Sequator and 10% DSS. I need more data to work out the red starburst streaks faintly visible in the Cigar Galaxy that is produced by supernovae and new born stars. The sharpness is quite weak as a consequence of using the Pentax 1.4x rear converter on a malfocused scope .





I WILL DEFINITELY GO ON TRYING AND TESTING THE SEQUATOR!

Did you try a white balance in Lightroom and play a bit with the clarity, contrast and noise reduction rulers? LR is my swiss knife for the final-final adjustments.

I've tried it all, but I have not managed to get more out of the Horsehead nebula compared to the 30x20sec picture posted a month ago (processed with Pixinsight and LR), at least not when using LR only. I guess I have to pay for the Pixinsight license to get more out of the stacked frames.
Stacking the 90 frames with Sequator seemed to provided a better end result than DSS.

I contacted the creator of Sequator Yi-Ruei Wu in Taipei, Taiwan. Yi Ruei was so friendly to give me an advice concerning the burnt out stars. He suggested to disable "auto brightness" and use only "HDR" to hold the brighness down. Another possibility would be to choose "linear" color space at the end of the menu or a combination of the two. And you know what - it worked!

This is my first Sequator-only astro image:



The sharpness and definition are way better than in DSS. M82 may be a bit oversharpened but that is my fault - shit happens...

Hi Pete, I was thinking about playing around with some of the settings, trying to reduce the burn thru that I was seeing in my stack. Thanks for contacting the author!!!!