Poto-Siril

Automatization around Siril (https://siril.org/) for deep sky astrophotography.

What is it?

Poto-Siril is a CLI tool to automate the pre-processing of astrophotography images on top of Siril.

Poto-Siril aims to overcome the repetitive and tedious work when pre-processing multiple layers before compositing an (L)RGB image (e.g. narrowband filters with a monochrome camera or a color camera with dual-band filters).

It works out of the box with images captured by a ZWO ASIAIR device or with any fit files that follow the same file naming convention and directory structure (more support to come, help is welcomed 👋).

Workflow 🚀

The essence of Poto-Siril is about:

• Organizing the raw data by grouping the multiple light sequences together in small groups (of the same filter, bulb, gain, etc…) tagged with the appropriate flats, darks, and biases.
• Running Siril script(s) on each group of lights to retrieve the calibrated lights, following:

Calibrated\_Light = \frac{Light\_Frame - Dark\_Frame}{Flat\_Frame}

• Stacking the calibrated lights to get a master light for each layer/filter.

In detail

• Easy import of lights and flats from night session(s) and search for associated darks and biases in a bank folder Import one or several night sessions (e.g. lights and flats from Autorun or Plan mode with ASIAIR) and automatically pick the darks and biases from the bank folder (matching bulb, gain, binning, …). A summary resumes the light sequence(s) and the calibration files associated.
• Complex Light - Flat matching Poto-Siril helps to associate the right flats with the right lights when the project consists of multiple night sessions where the flats changed over time, e.g., a significant date gap between shooting sessions having a new collimation tuning and/or new dust in the optical train.
• Multi-layers project structure The imported files ☝️ are organized by filters and light sets (bulb, gain & binning, if there are multiple combinations). Each light set will map to a light sequence in Siril to be pre-processed separately. 👉 You can easily work on an LRGB or LRGBHaOIIISII project.
• Batch Siril script execution to pre-process the data (Generates and) Runs a Siril script (.ssl file) to calibrate the lights for each light set, based on a customizable ssl file template.
• A/B testing (PLANNED) Run the (generated ☝️) Siril script with different parameters (e.g. rejection algorithm, sigma low/high thresholds) and compare the results. Or run several different pre-processing scripts and compare the results.

What it is not doing

Poto-Siril does not eliminate bad light images, and everything related to the final processing such as channel compositing, color calibration, background extraction, etc…