Astrophotography image stacking software free code#

To that end, most of the code was written from scratch, since I wanted to avoid big dependencies like OpenCV - it's not much of a learning experience otherwise. But I wanted to play with computer vision for a while now, and it was a refreshing side project to work on. I am neither a photographer nor a computer vision person, and my approach to solve this problem may be clumsy at times. DisclaimerД«efore I dive into the details of this project, I should add a quick disclaimer.

There will also be plenty of pretty pictures along the way. In the following, I will briefly outline my approach to the problem, what worked and what didn't work. However, getting there turns out to be quite difficult. If we throw plenty of math at the problem, the answer is yes! - with enough input images, we can reconstruct hundreds of stars from what used to be a black night sky. Since I'm a programmer and not a photographer, the obvious question to ask was this: Maybe we can't take better pictures - but if we had a lot of such low quality input images, could we somehow extract a single, higher quality picture of the night sky from them? This is what this project is all about. However, most consumer cameras use only a short exposure time, and you might end up with a picture that looks like the raw input image in the video above: A dim image with only a handful of bright stars visible - certainly not worth sharing on your social medias. The problem is that stars are actually surprisingly dim, and to properly capture them on film, the camera sensor needs to be exposed to the sky for a long time. If you've ever taken a photo of the night sky with a cell phone or a consumer camera, you might have been disappointed with the results. Star Stacker: Astrophotography with C++11