Welcome to DeepSkyStacker 6.1.0 Beta 4

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.

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

Changes for DeepSkyStacker 5.1.8:

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.
Bug fix: The circles around the stars and the comet stayed even after clearing the file list.
Lower the minimum detection threshold for registering from 2% to 1%.
Bug fix: Crash caused by trying to de-bayer 32 bits FITS files with the method AHD.
Bug fix: AVX support to prevent Illegal Instruction problem on earlier CPU types (e.g. Xeon X5650).
Bug fix: Add check box to control display of Black/White clipping in Processing panel.
Bug fix: Custom rectangle produces a partly empty stacking result when the SIMD acceleration is turned ON.
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.
Bug fix: Computation of the final star centres has been corrected. The old version was slightly biased towards left/up of the real centre.
Finish conversion of code to Qt - there should be no MFC stuff left.
Upgrade LibRaw to 0.23.1
Upgrade LibTIFF to 4.7.0
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.
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".
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.
Bug fix: Add a small windows resource file so the application icon gets set.
Write all output text streams to a QByteArray buffer, and then use a single QFile::write() to write them.
Changes to allow the DeepSkyStacker main window to display correctly on a monitor with an effective size of 1280x720 (1920x1080 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.
Add translations for Simplified Chinese thanks to 张博 (Zhang Bo).
Changes to DeepSkyStackerLive to use the new Quality metric instead of Score.
Bug fix: Fix for handling of save file-list.
Bug fix: Correct calculation of ellipse for star registration. Was using 210 degrees not 270 degrees.
Bug fix/enhancement: Changes to support RAW files from monochrome cameras such as the Leica M series.
Resolve problems with editing controls on Processing Panel.

deepskystacker/DSS 6.1.0-Beta4 DeepSkyStacker 6.1.0 Beta 4 on GitHub