Seti Astro Suite Pro
A different and relatively new image processing suite for astrophotographers
Until recently the main goto software for image processing have been Deep Sky Stacker, Siril, PixInsight, Sequator, AstroSurface, Astro Pixel Processor, Astronomy tools, Autostakkert!, Affinity Photo and a handful of lesser known programs. These range from expensive paid-for software, to freeware-donationware. Some, such as Sequator and Autostakkert! are mainly stacking software, whilst others have various post stacking capabilities. For a variety of reasons, financial among them, each program has its own following of loyal users.
Seti Astro Suite Pro (SASP)
SASP is being developed at a prodigious rate with a couple of versions being released in a week being quite common. At the time of writing the version is 1.3.18
SASP runs on Windows, Linux, MacOS x86-64 and Apple silicon.
Seti Astro Suite Pro is developed by Franklin Marek. It is written in Python with Qt6 and is open source donationware. SASP grew out of Seti Astro Suite, its predecessor, as more advanced functionality was added.
SASP has comprehensive functionality and has integrated GraXpert and Starnet++ functionality as long as the software is present and the binaries are available. SASP also has integrated Aberration Correction (AI) and Franklin Marek’s own software; the Cosmic Clarity suite plus other processes.
Rather than list the processes available we shall use a series of screenshots showing the drop down menus that give access to the various processes.
One process that sets SASP apart from other image processing software is that it offers Multi-Frame Deconvolution Stacking (Image MM) in addition to offering regular stacking.
Multi‑Frame Blind Deconvolution has been developed by a mix of international academic research groups, national observatories and institutes, defence laboratories, and industry teams collaborating to develop algorithms into high‑performance systems.
Image MM works in a completely different way to regular stacking and so in SASP provides choice in how a final stacked image is produced.
Multi-Frame Deconvolution (Multi-Frame Blind Deconvolution (MFBD)) is a class of image-restoration methods that jointly estimate a single high‑quality latent image and the set of blurring kernels (point‑spread functions, PSFs) that produced a sequence of separately blurred frames, then combine that information to produce a single de-blurred, higher‑signal image.
Regular stacking (alignment and ‘averaging’) improves signal‑to‑noise ratio by summing information but does not remove blur introduced by the PSF. SNR (Signal to Noise ratio) improves as √(n) where n = the number of frames stacked, but resolution stays limited by the worst blur.
Multi-Frame deconvolution explicitly models and removes the blur by estimating PSFs and inverting the convolution process, recovering higher spatial frequencies and therefore improving effective resolution in addition to SNR.
Regular stacking assumes the object is unchanged and that noise/statistical rejects are the main issues.
MFBD leverages frame‑to‑frame PSF diversity as information, so it can recover detail lost to variable blur.
PSF estimation per frame measures PSFs or estimates them blindly within the optimisation loop.
Iterative reconstruction alternates updates of the latent image and the PSFs until convergence, using regularisation to avoid noise amplification.
Final combination output is a single deconvolved image with improved resolution and SNR compared with any single frame or a simple ‘average’ stack.
Some stages in the Muti-Frame Deconvolution Stacking of a group of images
SASP offers regular stacking with Drizzle if required. This is computationally less demanding than Multi-Frame Deconvolution Stacking and executes quicker, particularly if GPU hardware acceleration is not available on the users computer. Multi-Frame Deconvolution may not execute properly if a non NVIDIA GPU or GPU co-processor such as RADEON graphics is present. However, it is possible to set the stacking suite not to use hardware acceleration and stacking then works, albeit without the speed advantage of hardware acceleration.
We have tested this successfully on 7 computers with various operating systems and SOCs. and found the speed without hardware acceleration to be quite acceptable.
It is clear that Seti Astro Suite Pro is set to be one of the main contenders in the league of astronomical stacking and image processing software.
The Seti Astro Suite Pro website can be accessed by using the link under the SASP logo at the top of this page, or click HERE.
