Recommended Settings For Combining Light Frames
Light images must be:
1) Dark subtracted
2) Optionally Flat Fielded
3) Optionally Normalized (Sigma will normalize if that feature is turned on).
4) Registered (stars aligned between images)
| Combine Method | Standard Deviation Masking |
| Pixel Arithmetic | Mean or Sum |
| Smoothing | Check both if lots of hot/cold pixels, I usually use a low sigma of 1.0 and high of 3.0. You should look at the percentage in the results dialog and adjust your values until you are despeckling no more than 0.1-0.2 percent.
WARNING: There is a bug in BETA 10. The controls for Despeckle-High and Despeckle-Low are reversed. |
| Normalization | Check on and try 60%. Check ignore black border if you want. If you get weird results with normalization on try unchecking it or try changing the percentage (try 100% , 80% , 40% and 20% to see what works best). |
| Ignore Block Border | Check |
| Sigma Value | 0.5 to start - Shoot for about 98% usage of each image in the results dialog.
Adjusting this value lower will decrease the percentage used in each image and will provide greater artifact rejection at the expense at the expense of possibly higher background noise. |