Hi,

I was also a little bit frustrated with that other 32 bits free stacking program , where I had either to crop my images or to convert them to 8 bits to handle them (and which is otherwise an excellent Software).

I just tried your Software, it worked nicely, thank you very much!

I have two suggestions:
- it would be very practical to estimate and display the number of detected stars before launching the full process
- it would be really nice to be able to select the reference image that will define the region of interest (without renaming all images) (or something more elaborate to select the region of interest)

and a question:
- does the Software use all images? or does it throw away automatically some of them? (low quality images, stars not round, ...)

and finally... what do you think about open source code? It might interest people to complement your already nice program.

I'm also saying this because of all these nice, free programs that are at some point abandoned with no possibility to keep them up-to-date. A pity to have to code from the beginning the same stuff again and again.

All Downloads are available from : http://www.skippystak.com.au/download/

Hi All,

I believe that I've solved the Mac and Linux problems. There are new zip files in the Download folder, and it'd be nice if someone could try them out.

I can't not having either a Mac or Linux box, and being utterly ignorant in such matters.

Now hand me a VMS system, and I'll make it dance and boogie... ;-)

Andrew

the "SkippyStak_mac_script_source" script tries to make an icon by creating a link to something in the IDL85 folder, but...

Hi Andrew,

I'd love to try out your program.   I'm also involved in a school based astronomy program, so your program is very appealing, especially if the Mac version is functional.

However, when I click on the file to run I get a Type Mismatch error?

I've tried changing properties so it is run as an administrator?

Any suggestions?

ta
DT

Hi All,

The IDL langauge in which SkippyStak is written is an interpreted, threaded language that produces partially compiled code
that can be saved out to a file, and read back in.

In the case of SkippyStak, that "sav" file is about 460kB in size at the moment. The rest of the 32MB full download consists sof all sorts of library and other accessory files.

What this means is that I only need to upload the small sav file for you to get any new coding mode/functionality, and
you just need to download the sav file, and copy it in place over the existing sav file in your SkippyStak folder.


I suppose that if you're prudent, you might want to copy the existing sav file out of the way, so that you can revert back to it in case the dopey programmer has broken something in he new version... ;-)

Andrew (who's quite over left over Xmas ham and turkey)

Merry xmas folks,

Andrew asked me to look into the best settings to use for DCRAW which he uses to convert raw camera files into TIFF format that SkippyStak can read. DCRAW can be used from the command line but I found a neat little app called RawDrop that lets you tweak some settings (link below).

However, regardless of whether I used the command line or RawDrop, I found that the DCRAW TIFFs were much noisier than those produced by Canon's Digital Photo Professional. For me, I think I will stick with batch converting my CR2s into TIFFs in DPP unless someone can work out better DCRAW settings.

Also, I couldn't get SkippyStak to load CR2 files directly, even with dcraw64.exe in the SkippyStak folder.

Dave

http://www.wizards.de/rawdrop/