Keith's Image Stacker

Keith's Image Stacker is an image processing program that is oriented primarily toward astrophotography. See my astrophotography webpage for information about my personal venture into that hobby. What Keith's Image Stacker provides, more than anything else, is a workspace in which to align many similar images (say from a quicktime movie of Jupiter taken through a telescope with a webcam) and then to produce a stack of the images, which consists of a single image that comprises either the sum, or the average, or some value in between of the individually stacked images. Stacking images is a well-established method for increasing the signal-to-noise ratio in a series of similar images. True "information" will shine through the stack, while random noise will drop out.

Here's are some examples of what can be accomplished with this program:

One frame (above, left), stack of 61 such frames with various processing (above, right)

Keith's Image Stacker is "uncrippled" shareware. For the endless hours of work I have put into creating this utility I ask that you please pay me $15.00, which automatically registers you for all future versions. In return I will place you on an extremely infrequent mailing list to be directly notified of version updates when they occur. Specific instructions for paying can be found in the README file that is bundled with the program. Thank you.

Thank you, and please contact me and tell me what you think of this program. I would really like to know people's reaction to it.

Publicity, Recognition

Keith's Image Stacker has received considerable publicity over the years. The following lists some of the more prominent examples.

• 2011
  Famous Why's Editor's Pick Award
  

• 20??
  Sky & Telescope magazine webcam imaging article

• 2005
  Wiley, K. B., Chambers, S. Long Exposure Webcams and Image Stacking Techniques. The Art and Science of CCD Astronomy, 2nd edition. David Ratledge, editor, 2005.

• Sky & Telescope magazine. Software review of Keith's Image Stacker and Keith's Astroimager, Aug 2004.

• Wiley, K. B. Long Exposure Webcams and Image Stacking Techniques for the Budget-Minded Astrophotographer. Astronomy magazine. Bakich, Michael, editor. Dec, 2003.

Download

Most of the configurations will actually run on any machine, but it is recommended that you download the configuration that best matches your machine. It will run faster and may alleviate bugs that occasionally occur when older configurations are run on newer machines.

v5.0.1

v5.0.1 for Intel Macs and OS 10.5 or later

v5.0

v5.0 for Intel Macs and OS 10.4 or earlier
v5.0 for PPC Macs and OS 10.4 or earlier

v4.2

v4.2 for PPC Macs and OS 10.4 or earlier

Documentation

The program comes with documentation in PDF format. Alternatively, you may:

• Download it in PDF format
• View it online in HTML format
• Download it in HTML format