About eise.app - Planetary Image Cloud Stacker
eise.app is the first web-based online planetary image stacking tool available in the solar system. The name is an ode to Eise Eisinga, a Frisian amateur astronomer who built a planetarium in his house. The main reason for developing yet another application for stacking is because of recent frustrations I had getting software running on my ARM based macbook. AutoStakkert4! didn't work in Wine, Planetary System Stacker by Rolf Hempel had python dependency issues, Lynkeos was slow with a very wonky UI and crashed continuously.
As a web developer, I saw an opportunity to make something simpler that works directly in your browser, regardless of your operating system. Initially, I thought about doing all the processing on a server, but that would be expensive and not scalable. Instead, eise.app does a chunk of the work in your browser using WebAssembly and WebWorkers, which turns out to be quite fast, and it just works (hopefully!) by navigating to this website!
Currently eise.app works as follows:
- The astrophotographer selects a video file from their machine.
- FFmpeg.js is used to extract frames from the video file.
- eise.app starts ranking (up to 5k) frames of the video based on sharpness.
- The best 30% of frames are uploaded to a VPS powered by Digital Ocean.
- On the server a slightly modified Planetary System Stacker (by Rolf Hempel) is stacking all frames it receives.
- The server returns the stacked image to the browser.
- A very basic post processor is opened, providing Wavelets sharpening, some noise reduction and color alignment. Code is from OpenCV and a GIMP plugin compiled to WebAssembly using emscripten.
In essence, eise.app is a blend of PSS's stacking capabilities combined with browser-based frame ranking and (post) processing.
I hope this web-app will improve your astrophotography workflow, or helps beginners not giving up when trying to set-up their software.
Happy Stacking,
Tijmen