Welcome to DeepSkyStacker 5.1.8 Beta 6

This release is all about finishing the conversion of the code to use Qt instead of MFC. That said, there are a few bug fixes,
and a number of enhancements as well. This isn't a complete list as many changes were made to improve code quality and
performance.

Only 64 bit versions of Windows 10 and later are supported in this release.

Scroll to the bottom of this page to download DSS-Setup.exe

To run the downloaded executable:

RIght-click on DSS-Setup.exe after you have downloaded it and select Properties. At the bottom of the first tab you will see a message saying:

Select "Unblock", and click on OK. You should then be able to run the installer.

If you need a version of DeepSkyStacker that will run on older versions of Windows or on 32 bit versions, you should use DeepSkyStacker 4.2.6:

https://github.com/deepskystacker/DSS/releases/tag/4.2.6

Known problems:

1. When the image exposure is less than 1ms and double-click to edit is used, if the user clicks away from the editor, then the exposure is set to zero.
   This requires too much work to fix in this release, as we will need to implement our own edit control.

Changes for DeepSkyStacker 5.1.8:

1. Bug fix: When saving the project to a file-list, a default file name is suggested which is equal to the name of the current directory.

2. Bug fix: The circles around the stars and the comet stayed even after clearing the file list.

3. Lower the minimum detection threshold for registering from 2% to 1%.

4. Bug fix: Crash caused by trying to de-bayer 32 bits FITS files with the method AHD.

5. Bug fix: AVX support to prevent Illegal Instruction problem on earlier CPU types (e.g. Xeon X5650).

6. Bug fix: Add check box to control display of Black/White clipping in Processing panel.

7. Bug fix: Custom rectangle produces a partly empty stacking result when the SIMD acceleration is turned ON.

8. Implement an automatic threshold for star detection (which is the default) and a much better image quality indication (Quality) which is a
   Gaussian mean of star quality as compared to the Score which was the sum of all star qualities (calculated differently) and was dependent
   on the number of stars as well as their quality.

   The automatic threshold will be in the range 0.05% and 100%, and the target number of stars is ~50.

   The new Quality metric is primarily based on the average circularity ("roundness") of the stars in the image. It is
   largely independent of the number of detected stars.

   The background level, to which the star detection threshold refers, is now calculated locally per 250x250 pixel square rather than
   globally over the entire image. This compensates for any background illumination gradients.

   All light frame sorting criteria have been switched to use the new Quality value instead of the Score (e.g. for stacking the best x% light frames).

   The first light frame to register will be either the first in the frame list, or the reference frame (if one was chosen). If auto-threshold
   is used, the detected threshold of this light frame will serve as the basis for the threshold search of the following frames.

   We suggest that you ensure that the first registered light frame is not significantly darker then the other frames (brighter is no problem),
   otherwise the number of detected stars might be very high.

9. Bug fix: Computation of the final star centres has been corrected. The old version was slightly biased towards left/up of the real centre.

10. Finish conversion of code to Qt - there should be no MFC stuff left.

11. Upgrade LibRaw to 0.23.1

12. Upgrade LibTIFF to 4.7.0

13. Bug fix: Fix broken handling of Up-Arrow, Right-Arrow, Down-Arrow, Left-Arrow; Page-Up and Page-Down keys for the sliders of the gradient control.

14. Bug fix: Attempting to load a FITS file from the image list failed with a message: "Failed to load ...". This was caused by a change in the Mime
    types database shipped with the latest version of Qt. It used to assign a type of "image/fits" to FITS files, but now assigns "application/fits".

15. Remove the code to check for LibRaw support of a camera. The data in the camera list wasn't really good for that check and resulted in false
    negatives and false positives however hard we tried to "tweak" the code to check against that list.

    This shouldn't cause any problems as a "not supported" decision simply resulted in a single warning message.

16. Bug fix: Add a small windows resource file so the application icon gets set.

17. Write all output text streams to a QByteArray buffer, and then use a single QFile::write() to write them.

18. Changes to allow the DeepSkyStacker main window to display correctly on a monitor with an effective size of 1280720 (19201080 at 150% scaling).
    This was achieved by moving the controls for the processing panel into the lower dockable window and allowing the displayed image to have a
    minimum height of 100 pixels. If you need to show the image larger, undock the lower dock window.

19. Add translations for Simplified Chinese thanks to 张博 (Zhang Bo).

20. Changes to DeepSkyStackerLive to use the new Quality metric instead of Score.

21. Bug fix: Fix for handling of save file-list.

22. Bug fix: Correct calculation of ellipse for star registration. Was using 210 degrees not 270 degrees.

23. Bug fix/enhancement: Changes to support RAW files from monochrome cameras such as the Leica M series.