Things are looking up for astronomers using macOS and Windows.
Affinity Photo by Serif now has Astronomical image stacking in the latest version 1.9.0.
This means that you can stack your deep sky images and then process the result all in a single application, and it is good!
Cropped screenshot showing the Astrophotography Stack as well as other options
Cropped screenshot showing types of frames Affinity Photo can use in the calibration and stacking process as well as the best percentage of files to stack
I have stacked TIFF files and FITS files and the results have been good. It is then a simple matter to move on to the post processing of the stacked image.
Cropped screenshot showing stacking options
Cropped screenshot showing the 'RAW' options.
To test the idea of doing the stacking and processing all within Affinity Photo, a William Optics 66mm, Apochromatic refractor was mounted on a Celestron AVX GOTO mount and a 14-bit ZWO ASI178MC camera was placed at the focus.
The equipment used
AstroDMx Capture for macOS was used to capture 60 x 30s exposures with matching dark frames of the Crab Nebula, using a Region of Interest of 1560 x 1560, which captured sufficient surrounding sky to place the nebula in context.
Screenshot of AstroDMx Capture for macOS capturing data on the Crab Nebula, M1.
M1, the Crab Nebula
The whole workflow was straightforward and produced a pleasing result.
This stacking capability of Affinity Photo is a boon to macOS users in particular, but also for Windows users, who now have even more choice of software for image stacking.
Affinity Photo is also a program that nicely complements the Gimp for image processing.
Affinity Photo is a paid for program but is priced realistically. Also, from time to time, Serif offer substantial discounts as they are doing at the time of writing this article.
I recommend this software particularly to macOS astronomers, who can now take their deep sky image processing from beginning to end within a single program.
