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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, legacy Sourceforge project and website are unmaintained.

La version actuelle est 0.9 alpha. La prochaine (et première) version officielle sera la 0.9 beta, ou 0.9b, et sera disponible dans les mois qui viennent.

A qui s'adresse Siril ?

Siril vise les astronomes amateurs qui ont acquis des images et qui veulent les traiter avec des moyens semi-automatiques. Il fournit une interface plus conviviale que la ligne de commande d'Iris, mais n'est pas autant automatisé que DeepSkyStacker ou Registax. Il fournit toutefois une ligne de commande pour accéder facilement à différentes fonctions de traitement.

Siril est capable de traiter des images planétaires (un grand nombre de petites images) aussi bien que de ciel profond (un nombre réduit d'images de grande taille avec un important pré-traitement). La registration est capable d'aligner automatiquement (seulement en translation pour l'instant) les images planétaires en utilisant une transformée de Fourier discrète, et les images de ciel profond en utilisant la PSF sur une étoile de référence, il ne faut donc pas un décalage trop important des images. La fonctionnalité d'alignement manuel rend Siril aussi utile aux astronomes amateurs ayant des images de mauvaise qualité ou plus généralement pour lesquelles les logiciels automatisés ont le plus de mal à trouver les points d'alignement.

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 the screenshots, some image processing results, or documentation pages.

News

The software is still in alpha phase, meaning it's still being heavily developed and quite unstable, but most functionalities are working. Many improvements have been done over the previous unmaintained version, including better handling of conversions, image sequences and errors, improving the GUI, and lots of bug fixes. 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 are also being developed, and new file formats being supported (all RAW, all BMP, all TIFF, JPEG, PNG, Iris' PIC, AVI and other films, SER). For a more complete list, see the 0.9 alpha page, the subversion log, or the list of features below.

La roadmap de Siril est dans le fichier TODO, et la liste des bugs connus est maintenue dans le fichier BUGS. Le journal des nouveautés est disponible dans le log SVN, pas encore sur le site. Les priorités pour les prochains développements sont l'ajout des ondelettes et le filtrage des meilleures images dans l'empilage de séquences planétaires. Ceux qui veulent participer sont les bienvenus !

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 new tutorial will document this process soon.

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:
    • 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
    • Image rotation and plate-solving are not implemented yet
  • Image stacking
    • Summing, median, median kappa-sigma and pixel maximum stacking
  • 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 normalization), 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 et installation

Siril is currently only released as source from its subversion base. There is a package for the Arch Linux system, built from the subversion source, in AUR. For other operating systems, you need Subversion (svn command) to retrieve it and autotools and gcc to compile it.

Dependencies

Siril depends on a number of libraries, which all should be available in your operating system if it is recent enough. See a list of packages names for Debian here. Mandatory dependencies are:

  • gtk+-3.4 (Graphical user interface library)
  • cfitsio (FITS images support)
  • fftw (Discrete Fourier Transform library)
  • gsl (The GNU Scientific Library)
  • libconfig++ (Structured configuration files support)

Les dépendances optionnelles sont :

  • libraw, libtiff, libjpeg, libpng pour l'import et parfois export d'images RAW, TIFF, JPEG et PNG. Les bibliothèques sont détectées lors de la compilation et ne peuvent donc pas être ajoutées après.
  • FFMS2 pour la gestion native des films comme des séquences. Elle permet d'extraire les images de films, pas que ceux pour l'astronomie. Les versions inférieures à la 2.20 ont un bug gênant, il est ainsi recommandé d'installer les dernières versions.

Instructions d'installation

En attendant qu'une version packagée soit sortie, le seul moyen de récupérer les sources est de le prendre de la base Subversion. Utiliser la commande :

$ svn co https://free-astro.vinvin.tf/svn/siril/

(sorry for the bad certificate). The source is read-only if you have no particular authorization. If you want to participate to Siril and be able to commit on the svn, send a message to user Vincent here.

Once you have got Siril's source code, it's easy to install it. Siril is managed with autotools, so it's simply built using ./configure and make. If you don't have autotools or other development packages, see this install documentation. The configure script is not shipped to allow for better interoperability and can be generated using this command:

$ aclocal && autoconf && autoheader && automake --add-missing

Ensuite lancez ./configure et make. Pour installer Siril, utilisez l'habituelle :

$ make install

Pour lancer Siril, la commande se nomme siril.

Qui est derrière Siril ?

Le chef de projet de cette nouvelle version est Vincent. Il est docteur en informatique, et utilise Siril en tant qu'amateur pour traiter des images provenant d'un EOS ou d'une caméra QSI sur un télescope de 410mm.

Cyril est docteur en physique ; il motive les nouveaux développement et fournit des algorithmes de traitements de haute qualité à Siril.

François Meyer a écrit le logiciel initial, jusqu'à la version 0.8.

Voir le fichier AUTHORS pour une liste complète des contributeurs.