Siril

Siril, a free astronomical image processing software

Siril is meant to be Iris for Linux (sirI-L). It is an astronomical image processing tool, able to convert, pre-process images, help aligning them automatically or manually, stack them and enhance final images. This page is the page for the new version of Siril.

Current version is 0.9.0 rc1. Coming up: 0.9 stable version (August 2015). Previous version was 0.9.0 rc1.

Who should use Siril?

Siril is targeted to amateur astronomers having acquired images and wanting to process them in a semi-automatic way. It provides a more user-friendly interface than Iris' command line, but it is not yet as automated as DeepSkyStacker or Registax. It also provides a command line to access various processing functions.

Siril is now fully capable to pre-process and process deep sky images (when built from latest source). One feature is still missing for planetary images processing is the automatic image quality evaluation, in other words image sorting, which makes the processing results quite low quality. The new star detection registration is perfect for deep sky images, but there are also two automatic translation-only registrations, one more suited for planetary and bright nebula images, based on DFT, and another more simple targetted at deep-sky images, based on PSF on a single reference star. Additionally, a manual alignment capability makes it also well fitted for amateur astronomers having feature-less or bad quality images that automatic tools fail to align properly.

Professional astronomers generally use 32-bit depth images, but Siril uses only 16-bit images internally (except temporary for stacking). Loading 32-bit images is supported but it will degrade them since they will be converted to 16-bit. It can still be useful if the intent is to produce public-friendly pictures.

And more generally, people who want to use free software on free operating systems to process images. Siril can even be used to extract previewed frames from many videos formats. For an overview, see some image processing results, or documentation pages.

News

• June 10, 2015
  • New registration method available!! It is now possible to register images with an automatic global star detection tool. The algorithm take into account the translation and the rotation.

• April 13, 2015
  • We have been working hard on accelerating stacking algorithms on multi-core CPUs, giving SER a better support and we are also working on the two main lacks of Siril: taking into account rotation and multi-point in registration, for better deep-sky and planetary registrations. These works are in progress, and will take some weeks to complete.

• December 29, 2014; committed revision 737
  • First release-candidate of Siril. Previous version was 0.9.0 beta.

• December 10, 2014; committed revision 707
  • Fixing critical bug in percentile clipping

• December 5, 2014; committed revision 694
  • A button has been implemented in order to stop the background process

• November 30, 2014; committed revision 678
  • Starting development of a multi-threaded application for heavy computation. There is a new thread for long tasks, keeping the GUI responsive. This commit implements it in the preprocessing.

• November 29, 2014; committed revision 677
  • Fixing bug in spline algorithm for background extraction

• November 27, 2014; committed revision 674
  • Big update with a bug fixed in the background extraction module. Also the spline algorithm has been improved.
  • New module to remove Canon banding (same algorithm as the script used in PixInsight)

• November 11, 2014; committed revision 671
  • First beta and package release of the new Siril. Previous version was known as 0.9 alpha and was not released outside subversion.

• November 8, 2014; committed revision 659
  • Fourier Transform module now accepts color images.

• November 2, 2014; committed revision 643
  • New rejection stacking process for small set of data: Percentile Clipping.

• October 31, 2014; committed revision 641:
  • Fixing critical bug in Winsorized Sigma Clipping.
  • Fixing rejected pixels count.

The software is in beta phase, meaning its stability is still being improved, but most functionalities are working. If you find bugs and want to report them (please, do!), contact the team using the links at the bottom of this page, or feel free to report it on the bug tracking page.

Many improvements have been done over the previous unmaintained version. The command line has been reactivated in large proportions, see the list of currently available commands on the dedicated Commands page. New commands and features have been and are being developed. For a complete list of features, see the 0.9.0 beta page, the subversion log, or the list of features below.

The roadmap for Siril is being updated for its after-release life. Ideas are stored in the Roadmap page, and the list of known bugs is maintained in the bug tracking page file. The complete changelog is available in the SVN log (not available online), a summary is available in the news section here and in the page of each release, as well as in the ChangeLog file. If you want to contribute, you are welcome!

Start using Siril / Documentation

Siril's works internally with FITS images, unsigned 16-bit per pixel and per channel. All images you want to process with Siril thus needs to be converted using the Conversion tab, except for SER and film sequences which are converted on-the-fly.

For pre-processing, Siril applies master offset/bias, dark and flat images to the current sequence. These master images thus have to be processed before processing the actual image sequence. Siril currently does not support processing multiple sequences at the same time, so each layer of the final image must be processed independently before assembling them into an RGB image.

A documentation page contains an illustrated complete processing tutorial, instructions on how to use particular features of Siril, along with a few videos to illustrate or describe these capabilities.

List of Siril features

New features are being introduced quite regularly. Here is a list of main features:

• Native image format support
  • unsigned 16-bit FITS files (other FITS are converted to this format on-the-fly)
  • SER files
  • AVI and many other film files
• Image conversion (to the native FITS format only)
  • Supported input types: 8-bit and 16-bit BMP, TIFF, JPEG, PNG files, NetPBM binary images, RAW DSLR images.
• Image registration; supported methods:
  • Global star alignment (rotation + translation)
  • Translation using DFT centered on an object, generally used for planetary images
  • Translation using PSF of a star, generally used for deek-sky images
  • Manual translation with two preview renderings of the current image with reference frame in transparency
  • Plate-solving is not implemented yet
• Image stacking
  • Summing
  • Median
  • Percentile clipping
  • Sigma clipping
  • Median sigma clipping
  • Winsorized sigma clipping
  • Linear fit clipping
  • Pixel maximum
• Pre-processing of images with multi-channel offset, dark and flat images
• Enhancement of final images: lightness/contrast cursors on each layer, different scaling modes (linear, log, square root, squared, asinh, histogram equalisation), negative and false colour rendering and clipping.
• A command line for various processing functions, see the list of available commands.
• A star finding algorithm with PSF information

Limitations:

• Only 3-channel colour images assigned to R, G and B are possible in the general workspace (image processing and sequence handling). It is however possible to manipulate many 1-channel image to create a colour composition, such as popular LRGB, RGBHa or SII-Ha-OIII images.

Compilation and installation

See Siril installation page. It documents which binary packages you can get and how to build from source if needed, for multiple operating systems. Siril is a free software, licence is GPL3. It will most likely never run or be supported on Windows family operating systems.

Who is behind Siril?

The project leader of this new version is Vincent. He is a computer scientist (PhD), and uses Siril as an amateur to process images from a Canon EOS and a B&W QSI camera on a 410mm telescope.

Cyril is a physicist (PhD), motivating new developments and providing high quality processing algorithms to Siril.

François Meyer wrote the initial (up to v0.8) versions. Here are the legacy Sourceforge project and website.

See the AUTHORS file for the complete list of contributors.