Welcome to DeepSkyStacker 6.1.0

Reporting problems:

Please report problems with DeepSkyStacker to the DeepSkyStacker mailing list hosted at groups.io:
https://groups.io/g/DeepSkyStacker
Thank you.

Installation:

Scroll to the bottom of this page to download the installer for your system (Linux, macOS, or Windows)

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

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

Linux:

DeepSkyStacker requires that kchmviewer is installed so that the help can be displayed.
To install that on Ubuntu versions of Linux:

sudo apt-get install kchmviewer

If you are running a different flavour of Linux, then you'll need to install it some other way.

Once you've downloaded the installer on Linux, you will most likely need to make it executable. For example:

chmod +x DeepSkyStacker-6.1.0_Beta_3-linux-x64-installer.run

You need to run the installer with root authority, so you should invoke it like this (for example):

sudo ~/Downloads/DeepSkyStacker-6.1.0_Beta_3-linux-x64-installer.run

If DeepSkyStacker won't start from the Desktop entries then you should try open a terminal window and run:

/opt/DeepSkyStacker/DeepSkyStacker

If you see:

qt.qpa.plugin: From 6.5.0, xcb-cursor0 or libxcb-cursor0 is needed to load the Qt xcb platform plugin.
qt.qpa.plugin: Could not load the Qt platform plugin "xcb" in "" even though it was found.
This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Available platform plugins are: xcb.

then you should install libxcb-cursor0 or xcb-cursor0 (whichever your installer offers)

sudo apt-get install libxcb-cursor0

worked for me on Ubuntu and Linux Mint systems.

If you get errors like:

/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.32' not found (required by ./DeepSkyStacker)
/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.31' not found (required by ./DeepSkyStacker)

then you need install a later version of libstdc++ :

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-toolchain-r/test
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libstdc++-13-dev

should do the trick.

macOS:

Just open the downloaded .dmg and run the installer that it contains

Setting up a symlink for using DeepSkyStackerCL on macOS

DeepSkyStackerCL is delivered in the DeepSkyStacker.app bundle. To use it you'll need define a symlink to it in e.g. /usr/local/bin

#
# If you need to, create the directory /usr/local/bin
#
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/bin
#
# Add a symlink so you can invoke DeepSkyStackerCL by typing DSSCL
#
sudo ln -sf /Applications/DeepSkyStacker/DeepSkyStacker.app/Contents/MacOS/DeepSkyStackerCL /usr/local/bin/DSSCL

You may also need to add /usr/local/bin to your path: You can do this by creating a file in your home directory
called .zshenv (assuming you're using zsh) this file might contain e.g.

# remove duplicate entries from $PATH
# zsh uses $path array along with $PATH 
typeset -U PATH path

pathadd () {
     	  if [ "$2" = "after" ] ; then
              PATH=$PATH:$1
       	  else
              PATH=$1:$PATH
          fi
        }
pathadd /usr/local/bin
pathadd ~/bin

Windows:

On Windows you should right-click on the downloaded installer 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.

Known problems:

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 would be a lot of work to fix as it would require us to implement our own custom edit control for the table cell.
This is considered a LOW priority issue - if anyone wants to develop code to do this a pull request will be considered.

Changes for DeepSkyStacker 6.1.0:

Both macOS (Ventura 13.4 and upward) on both ARM and x86_64 systems and also Linux are now supported.
The Linux version is built on Lubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish) and should work on most recent Linux systems.
Remove final traces of the old Score metric (e.g. from the info.txt files where it was called OverallQuality).
Bug-fix: Change to the progress dialogue to prevent it stealing focus.
Set code page to utf-8 so that Exiv2 can read files with fileids such as: C:\Τεστερ\ABM8W.jpg
When starting DeepSkyStackerLive, create a DSSLive.settings file with "default" settings if it does not exist.
Correct the code that checks for SIMD support on Linux. It wasn't working correctly.
Add code to invoke kchmviewer on Linux and uchmviewer on macOS to display the help, and ship uchmviewer inside
the DeepSkyStacker.app bundle.
Changes to associate an icon with .dssfilelist files and to provide DeepSkyStackerLive with its own icon.
Ensure that Visual C++ runtime build 35211 is installed.
Update CFITSIO to 4.6.2
Bug fix: SIGSEGV on Linux caused by incorrect call to TIFFSetField for EXIFTAG_CFAPATTERN
If the user specifies a filelist name without an extension, add .dssfilelist
Allow specification of the maximum number of processing threads to be used for registration and stacking
in the Settings/Stacking Settings dialogue. The default is set to the number of logical processors,
but this can be changed. We recommend a maximum of 8 even though the default will be higher if you have
more processors available.
Bug fix: Some translatable strings were not being updated when the language was changed.
Bug fix: SIGILL crashes on Linux running on processors that didn't support AVX2.
A major re-structuring of the AVX code was needed to resolve this.
Work round for nasty g++ problem: std::vector elements of AVX data types were incorrectly aligned which
caused a SIGSEGV (crash).
Upgrade Qt to 6.9.1, and LibRaw to 21.4
On Linux and macOS, the help viewer wasn't closed when DeepSkyStacker was closed.
Bug fix: Fix problems introduced by AVX code restructuring. Seestar problems and Drizzle not working.
Some code cleanup of the changes made for AVX code restructuring.
Bug fix: The name of the html summary file was created from the file list file name incorrectly.
It was appending .html to the content of the filename up to but not including the first '.' character.
It should have used up to but not including the last '.' character.
Implement SIMD decoding for GRBG and BGGR Bayer patterns.

Changes for DeepSkyStacker 5.1.10:

Add code to FITSUtil.cpp to process FITS keywords DATAMIN and DATAMAX when reading floating point FITS files.
If present use these to determine the minimum and maximum pixel values instead of scanning the image data which
gave inconsistent image scaling.
This should be a) much faster, and b) should result in consistent image scaling.
Also write these keywords when writing floating-point FITS files.
Bug fix: Fix rounding error in "stack recap" dialogue in calculation of total exposure time.
Bug fix: Resolve problems with handling of saving filelist (empty extension amongst others).
Bug fix: Resolve problems with the ProcessingSettings dialogue.
Bug fix: Ensure that Visual C++ runtime build 34438 is installed.
Remove obsolete Score metric.
If a crash occurs in the Visual C++ redistributable code, then issue a message saying:
DeepSkyStacker has crashed in the Visual C++ Redistributable code, probably because that is back-level.
Please download the latest version of the Visual C++ Redistributable from the Microsoft website.
```
https://aka.ms/vs/17/release/vc_redist.x64.exe
```
and then run it, selecting the "Repair" option
Make sure the installation deletes old versions of the Visual C++ Redistributable files from the installation directory.
Bug fix: Open picture file should use the Linear transformation not log(Sqrt) so that the image is displayed correctly.
Implement default values for FITS keywords DATAMIN and DATAMAX which can be set using FITS/DDP settings

deepskystacker/DSS 6.1.0 DeepSkyStacker 6.1.0 on GitHub