Software for combining mono and color

[Rickster]

Is anyone aware of software that will overlay or stack mono (grayscale) exposures and one shot color (OSC) exposures in real (or near real) time? Here is what I would like to do. I have two telescopes on the same mount. One has a color camera and one has a mono camera. I would like to simultaneously take and stack exposures from both cameras/telescopes. I would like to do this because I get the best sensitivity and detail with a mono camera, but mono loses a dimension without color. So, I would like to be able to colorize the mono image using a second telescope/camera.

[clouzot]

I’m pretty sure SiriL would be able to do that, provided you write the scripts for it.

[Ubuntu]

Yes... for sure no soft exists at the moment... would certainly need a bit of programing

[Rickster]

I understand from searching Cloudy Nights that Pixinsight will do it in post processing. But I haven't figured out what it would take to make it work for live stacking. I am good at building hardware projects and not so good at building software.

Thanks for the tip on Siril. I hadn't heard of that one. I will look into it.

[clouzot]

I cited SiriL because I know it’s already been used for live stacking, and it also supports preprocessing images (darks, offsets and the such). So I gather there’s a pretty high probability that mixing luminance and RGB is doable before stacking

[Steph]

It's hard to do it in real time,with each frames, especially if the camera and focal are differents, the processing time would be long.

But it's not difficult to combine a mono and color final stack in Photoshop for exemple. The mono Stack (luminance channel) must have a bigger size (in pixel) than the color stack.

You can also do that in Pixinsight of course, and IRIS, who is good for this job.

If you have an exemple, I can try to make an action in Photoshop, I just need two .tif image delinearized 16it.

[Guimby]

I've already seen this be done in photoshop, but not in live... Interresting subject!

[Rickster]

I do have Photoshop (CS6, I think) on my astronomy computer. But I have not used it. The computer is built for this kind of work. It is a Dell T7500 workstation with 12 Xeon cores and 72GB of ram.

[Steph]

I do have Photoshop (CS6, I think)

It's good with CS6.

Here an exemple with a very simple Photoshop action in step by step mode for you to understand...sorry @Rickster but in french.

Two images, one for luminance with details, and one for color (no need details, only enough colors), not the same size, not the same angle, with a strange sky... but remember, it is necessary to have enough common pixel for a automatic alignement.

combine.jpg

and the Photoshop action video

[Rickster]

Excellent Steph! Thank you. I will be giving Photoshop a try.