 Image stacking is an essential technique for deep sky astrophotography, and there are many different software packages available that can stack your images. Some are free, some paid, some are fairly easy to use, and some more complex. When I was first getting into deep sky astro several years ago now, I only initially found information about two different programs, Deep Sky Stacker and Pixinsight. In about a year or two after that, I found out about SIRL, which is a great free and open source project under active development. And so those are the three Deep Sky Stacker, Pixinsight, and SIRL that I've been demonstrating on my channel. You can see them in many of my processing videos where I go start to finish through the whole process. And honestly, I like all three, but I've been aware that there are many other options for stacking available today. So with this video, I'm going to finally branch out and compare eight different astro stacking software packages, comparing them systematically using the same data, and then share all of my thoughts and results, which may help you decide which software to use and whether it's worth switching to a new one. Hi, my name is Nico Carver, and I'm here on YouTube to help people who want to capture and process photos of the night sky. And my focus is Deep Sky astrophotography, meaning photos of the stars and nebulae and other objects outside of our solar system. The disclosures for this video are really easy because I have no business relationship with any of these software companies I'm reviewing. And half of these are free, but any software that did cost money, I did by myself. This video does have a sponsor, which is Brilliant, and I'll talk more about them midway through the video. The way I'm going to organize this video is I have a chart here with six categories, cost, operating systems, user interface and user experience that I abbreviated as UIUX, features, speed, and final result. So for each software, I'm going to cover these six areas, talk about them, and then give a score in each category. It's a little bit more complex than that because the categories aren't all weighted the same. So for example, the final result that you get out of the stacker I think matters more, so that one's out of 10, while many of the other categories are just worth between three and five points. So the total perfect score would be 30 points. And after we've gone through all the software, I'll summarize what I found, including any surprises. And I'll give a few personal opinions and recommendations. So let's jump in. I'm going to go alphabetical, so we'll start with Affinity Photo. Okay, here's Affinity Photo. If you've never seen it before, it's sort of like a Photoshop clone, but the really cool thing about it is that it has Astrophotography stacking features. So if you look here under File, New Astrophotography Stack, this is built right into current versions of Affinity Photo. So you can stack and calibrate and do all that right here in Affinity, and then continue working on it just like it's a Photoshop document. So I think this is really cool. I have had it for a long time. And actually, I bought it when it was on sale for $25. I did look at the current price, and it was $55. But I think even at $55, it's a steal for what it can do. So if you're interested in its features after I explain it a bit more here, definitely consider it. So in terms of cost, it gets a two out of three. In terms of operating systems, it also gets a two out of three. It covers macOS and Windows, but not Linux. And I am really impressed by the user experience here. So again, I got into this Astrophotography stacking mode just by going to File, New Astrophotography Stack. It opens up this new interface. And then over here on the right, it's just very easy to add the different frames. So I can just click on Lights, Add Files. I'll add a bunch here. It's pretty speedy. It shows me a list. I can click into any of those light frames and examine them. And let's say I didn't like that one. I can just hit the little trash key to trash it. And now it's off the list. There are not too many stacking options, a few different stacking methods with some clipping controls and then a few options for how it's going to demosaic and read the Bayer pattern. And then you can use all the calibration frames. But that's about it. If you are shooting with a mono camera, you can load in your different filters all at once. So that's a nice feature. But it wasn't clear to me how to do multi-night. Now, I may just be missing it. And again, I'm new to a lot of these programs. So forgive me if I ever say anything wrong here. It does have this little thing down here, best light frames. But it wasn't clear to me, if I did put in less than 100% how it would be evaluating the light frames to reject them. So I would say that it is very good, but there seems to just be some explanation needed or maybe some missing features in terms of a full stacking program. But it does cover all the basics quite well. So anyways, after you've loaded everything in here, you then just click Stack. It goes away, gives you a little generic waiting message. And then when it's all done, you click Apply and can bring it right into Affinity Photo, the main interface, which is a lot like Photoshop. So in terms of UI, UX, I'm giving it a 5. I think it's very intuitive and it's a nice modern design. So I really didn't see anything wrong with the user experience or user interface. In terms of features, though, I'm just giving it a 2 out of 5. And I'm waffling between a 2 and a 3 because it really does the basics quite well. But there was just enough missing in terms of explanation, for instance, how it determines the percentage of best light frames that I gave it a 2. And in terms of speed, it's middle of the pack, 2 out of 4 at 16 minutes, 46 seconds to stack 100 light frames without full calibration. This is on a pretty fast computer. And then in terms of the final result, I'll show you right here, this is going to make more sense as we compare other ones. But my main issue with the final result was that it didn't come out linear. So a linear response I can see in the others is just mostly black, a few white star cores. This one came out brighter, like it was already stretched. And that means that I couldn't complete some linear operations that work best with linear data, like photometric color calibration. And so that's why this one from Affinity Photo has sort of a different color look to it. Even though I applied the photometric color calibration, it didn't really take correctly because it wasn't linear data out of the program. So that might be a small thing. It might not matter to you, but that's why I knocked some points off there. Next up we have Astropixel Processor. I feel like this one is one of those, you either love the user interface or you hate it. And I haven't met many people that are sort of ambivalent. I guess I actually might be the only person that's somewhat ambivalent, but I'm more on the hating it side. You can see that even just sort of how it renders windows with the text feels very like old school. Just everything about it feels old school, even though it's a modern program. And in general, I just think it uses terminology weird, like for instance, even this, it's like, okay, I want to get rid of all the light frames I've added and the button says clean. So I mean, it's fine. It's just sort of quirky, I would say. And then there's just a lot of terminology and over here, why am I seeing all of these sliders right now? It's not all clear to me. And so I would just say it probably needs some work in terms of the user interface, but I could understand that some power users may really like this. Anyways, the one thing that it does do well is it leads you through the pre-processing steps right over here with numbers. So you know to start in the number one, load a tab, you load in your lights, your flats, your darks, your bias, and then you go to the calibrate tab and then analyze stars. And the nice thing about this is that it does lead you through, it gives you options at each step. The bad thing about this is that it's, at every step it's asking you to do stuff and then click a button. So it's not like Deep Sky Stack or Affinity Photo or many of the other programs where you can set this all up at once and then just hit one button to start the whole process and it goes from here to here to here to here. With this one you have to actually go into each thing and click Analyze Stars, then go into Register and look at these settings and click Start Registration and then go into the next thing and do that. So I think it takes a bit longer to do it that way and that bore out in the results. Let's take a look at them. So in terms of cost, it was pretty expensive. It's $165 if you want an owner's license. It do have a slightly cheaper option if you want to rent the software. It is available on three operating systems, Mac OS, Windows and Linux. Like I said, the UI UX I thought was quirky with lots of exposed options. So I gave it a three out of five feature set, definitely a five out of five. It has many cool options. It can normalize, it can do mosaics very easily. It does analysis of the frames in lots of different cool ways. So that's definitely a five out of five and it tells you what it's doing. So that's another feature, I think, in these stacking software that's appreciated. In terms of speed, it came in last place. So I had to give it a zero out of four. It took 34 minutes, 23 seconds to calibrate and register and stack 100 lights with full calibration. In terms of the final result, I think it did quite well, seven out of 10. The result was linear, the points knocked off were because to my eye, the final result had more noise visible than the PIX Insight result. Okay, next up we have ASTAP and I had heard of ASTAP before but I had never really had the time to check it out. But now I have and I can say I am really impressed. It's really, really nice. It's a little bit on the sort of scary side when you open it. If you are not sure what to do here, because it just sort of opens up on a blank screen but probably a lot of unfamiliar language up here to most people. But if you just click on stack up here at the top, then it opens up this new window and I think this is a lot more clear. It has tabs for your lights, your darks, your flats, your flat darks or bias frames. You can blink frames here, it would just meaning go through them, view them. It has some other options. But the only thing I really tried is just, go into lights, load them in, same thing with darks, flats, bias and once everything was loaded in, just click stack and it gets going. And the thing that I do really appreciate about ASTAP here is that like DeepSky Stacker and some of the other software, I think it's very easy to go basic or if you want to, you can do things like analyze the files, you can blink them, you can do more with it, but you don't have to. And you can just keep it as a very easy to use, intuitive kind of stacking program. So well done and it is completely free. Let me bring up the chart here. Right, so it gets a three out of three on cost because it's free. It gets a three out of three on operating systems because it covers all the major operating systems. I gave it a three on UIUX, just because it's a little bit busy UI, I think that it could probably be simplified a little bit, but it was easier than I initially thought. I guess my issue with the UI is just that there is a lot going on that I'm not sure if it might be wiser to separate out. For instance, pixel math, pixel math to photometry, all these different things. It's really cool that it has all that and it's a nice, it makes it more full-featured definitely, but I'm not sure if these should be in this stack window rather than options up here. Like I would think that pixel math is more of a tool that should go in here, but instead it's in the stack menu. So just a small thing, but that's why I gave it a three out of five on the UIUX. Three features, I gave it a three out of five. It covers the basics very well and there are a few extras in terms of stacking like image analysis and live stacking. For speed, it got a one out of four. It took 27 minutes, 38 seconds, and the final result was super impressive. I thought it was the second best out of all eight, so I gave that a nine out of 10. It was just a hair under the leader. It was really, really good. So I think this is definitely a sleeper right now. Not many people are using it, but you probably should check it out because it did really well across the board. Okay, here's DeepSkyStacker. I'm sure many people watching have tried this at least once. It's a very well-known piece of stacking software and I think the genius of it is that they do keep updating it. It's now on version 4.2.something, but it has stayed very consistent. So in terms of the user interface, it looks exactly like this and it has since I started using it several years ago and that makes it very easy to pick up because you can go to any old tutorial and it will still work as it did before. And that's what I think is genius about the user interface here. It's also free, which makes it popular because it's something that works well, that's free, that you can find good tutorials for, is going to take off. So that's I think DeepSkyStacker's strength, is that all you have to do is just follow down along here, along the left-hand side. It has one of the easiest multi-night interfaces I've seen. As soon as you start adding files here to the main group, it adds a new group down here. If we add files to group one, it will make a group two tab and so forth for all the different nights and then you can calibrate and stack them all together all in one go. It's very good about putting in little warnings if you've forgotten to do something. I think it says, don't forget to add and check dark flat and offset frames before stacking. So I like that. It has a lot of the right options, you know what I mean? So like, and then it just, it does a lot of cool things with the user interface. So like it has this recommended settings tab thing where it can look at your data and recommend things for you to try. Not all of them are things I always try, but the defaults even are great in DeepSky Stacker. So just a lot of smart, well thought out feature sets and an easy UI that really just does one thing well, which is basic stacking. So let's look at the chart for this one. So it gets a three out of three for cost at $0. It's only available on one operating system. So I think it's a one there for UI UX as you might imagine from my glowing review there it is a five out of five for me. It's consistent and it's straightforward. And then for features, it's a three out of five because it just covers the basics, but I give it above affinity because it does multi-night in a very easy way that I understand affinity. I wasn't quite clear how to do multi-night. I was clear how to do different filters, but I wasn't sure if calibrating and stacking multiple nights together was easy in affinity. For speed, it got a two out of four. Again, sort of middle of the pack, 10 minutes, 30 seconds, but that's pretty quick. And then for the final result, I think it was on par with AstroPixel processor that gave them both seven out of 10. While I focus on astrophotography on this channel, I of course also have a fascination with the science of astrophysics, which is why I'm very happy to be sponsored by Brilliant. Brilliant is a completely hands-on way to learn with interactive lessons for learning everything in science, math, computer science. And I've been working through some fascinating lessons on astrophysics. Lately, I've been doing the series on exoplanets because that's a really hot area of study with tests and the JWST now fully operational. So if you want to really dig in and understand the cutting edge science being done with our space telescopes, I think these courses on Brilliant would be a great start and they're adding new courses and lessons all the time. So head to brilliant.org slash Nebula Photos to get started with Brilliant's interactive lessons. The first 200 to sign up for free through my link will also get 20% off an annual premium membership. Okay, now we come to Pix Insight. This is the most expensive program of the bunch, but it has a lot of features outside of just stacking and then calibration or distribution stacking. You could do any number of ways in this program, but I'm going to focus on the one that I think most people should use when starting out, which is under script, batch processing, weighted batch preprocessing. So this is what I am really reviewing in terms of Pix Insight's stacking abilities because they've added so much into this script that it really is, again, what I think most people should be using today. So pretty easy UI that has the tabs up here for adding bias, darks, flats, lights. You can also just organize all that into a directory and click the directory button and point it at the directory and it will auto find all of these. So that's a nice little feature. Once you add them, let me go ahead and just do that. Once you've added all of your files, you go to this calibration page and this is really, really well done. There's some maybe terminology you have to learn, like what CFA images are, that just means color images rather than mono. So it's not that it's completely beginner friendly, but I think with a couple tutorials, you could learn it very fast and then it just has so much cool learning stuff in it, like these calibration flow diagrams, explain exactly how it's going to calibrate your images. There's so many nice options over here that make sense. You can do things like optimize a master dark or not. You can add an offset or a pedestal, I mean. You can, you know, there's just, there's a lot of cool stuff in here. There is the ability to do multi-night through keywords. You can do a manual reference image for the registration. So it's really well laid out and I really like how many options there are. After calibration, you can do it how I did it for this test, which is just to try to be more fair, I think to all the programs. I did just a normal image registration and image integration, but you can also turn on more active steps. This will add more time and also possibly more disk space as it creates more files. If you're not sure which one you wanna do, it also has this really nice little preset thing over here and you can tell it do maximum quality, do faster or do fastest. So that's really nice too. And then it will change some of the options for you. It also has a diagnostic ability. So it can, once you've loaded in a bunch of things and clicked on some settings, it will give you warnings or errors. So right now it's telling me that error, the specified output directory does not exist. Oh, whoops. So I can just go down here to output directory and change it to something else. And now if I hit diagnostics again, you can see that warning disappeared. But now I have a new warning. The required working space is more than the available space on that external hard drive. So I'd have to find a new place to store all of this. Now that actually brings up an interesting point, one that I haven't really been talking about yet, which is these stacking programs work differently and PIX Insight and Seral and Astropixel processor, maybe Registar, those ones are ones that definitely create a lot of files as they're working on the stuff. And some of those, like PIX Insight and Astropixel processor, just leave all of those files for you to do something with. You can either delete them or you can save them. Some other programs will put those into a temporary directory. And then once it's all done stacking, delete the temporary directory. But in any case, it is nice that it tells you ahead of time what the total estimated size is gonna be so it can warn you you don't have enough space. And then I could just choose a different spot on my computer to put that. Let's check, let's see if that one works. And yep, that message disappeared. It now tells me you're gonna use about 40 gigabytes, but you have 650 gigabytes free. Okay, then when you're ready to run it, you just click run. So again, this is one of those types of engines where you can set it up to do all this stuff and then just click run and it goes through and does everything and you end up with a final result if you want. It gets a zero to three on cost because it's $230. It covers all the operating systems. So it's three out of three there. So when I give it a four out of five here, I know some people will probably think that's bizarre that they think the UI UX for Pixinsight is terrible, but I actually don't think the weighted batch pre-processor UI UX is terrible anymore. It has gotten so much better and so well done that I have to give it four out of five. I don't give it five out of five because I'm afraid that it's still gonna change on me because they've been changing it like every few months. So it's not consistent enough for me to give it a five out of five yet, but I do give it a four out of five just for all that cool learning stuff like the calibration diagram and all of the nicely laid out options. And then five out of five on features, it is just the ultimate. And if you want advanced options for stacking and you wanna be able to manually do everything if that's what you want, Pixinsight has it all. It's not the fastest. It gets a one out of four there. It took over 20 minutes, but the final result was my favorite of the bunch. It was both sharp, but also low noise, which I feel that most of these results were one or the other. They could be sharp, but preserved a lot of the noise or they looked okay, but then when you really, like the deep sky stacker, when you zoom in, the stars are just a little bit bloated compared to what I'd get with Pixinsight or something else. Okay, let's move on to Redstar. I've heard about Redstar for a while, but I never really thought of it as a full featured stacking program. I thought of it more as just like a registration program for mosaics and things like that. And I don't think my opinion of that has really changed too much. It is not intuitive when I was trying to figure out how to even get it to stack a bunch of stuff. Eventually I found through digging through the help topics here that I would need to execute scripts to make that work. Now the nice thing is if you go into the help file, somewhere here, yep, sample scripts. So they do have a sample preprocess script for calibration. You do have to just sort of copy it out of the help file here and copy and paste it into a text file and then run it. That's not too bad. But then it's actually, you know, separate calibration, which they call preprocess register and stacking. So you'd have to do it three times and each time you have to run the script and possibly change what's going to be in each script because it's relying on you to tell it where your preprocessed images are going to be. So it gets a little bit complicated. I don't think that most people would find this easy to stack their images this way. But then my bigger complaint with it is it was just one of the worst in terms of the final result. It didn't seem to apply the flat fielding correctly, as you'll see here. Okay, so looking at the chart here, it costs $99. So that gets a two out of three. It is only available on Windows. So one out of three. The UI UX, I hated it. I'm sorry if some people love it. It was in the old-school UI is one thing, I think Astropixel processor also has a pretty old-school user interface, but the user experience to me was not intuitive at all. Even after going through the help files and writing my sample scripts, I wasn't clear if I was doing it correctly based on the final result. So the basics were unclear. This is also in features. And then the biggest feature it seemed to be missing, in my opinion, was there was no mention of bias frames or offset frames, dark flats, nothing like that. So it only allowed you to use flats, darks, and lights. Again, this could be something that someone has figured out and I'm just missing, but I did read through all the help things on scripts and I couldn't find any mention of bias frames. It was pretty quick, or more middle of the road, I should say, two out of four, 15 minutes. And the final result, I can't say it was good because it was not flat fielded correctly, which caused big issues with this data. And I would say any program that I'm using that can't do flats correctly, I would just not really continue using. Okay, next up we have Sequader. And this is a program that I have tried out for some Milky Way processing with landscape and I thought for that it was brilliant. I, for that is it's one thing where I usually actually don't use calibration frames. Sometimes I'll just stack, you know, landscape Milky Way without it. And this is a really cool program for doing that kind of work. For deep sky work, I don't think it's as cool. It's just, it's missing some major features. So we'll get into that. But I do think the UI is easy because it just sort of leads you through here, you know, right on the front, it says please add star images. So I can just double click on star images. I know what that means. Noise images, it means darks. Now this is a little bit more confusing because you have to know to look down here at the bottom for this little help dialogue where it says also known as dark frames. I wish it just said darks because like all the other programs do. And again, vignetting images, I wish it just said flat field images. It says that again, down at the bottom, also known as flat field images. There are a few little options, but for the most point, it's just bare bones kind of stacking in terms of deep sky. And in terms of the chart, it is a three out of three for a cost, it's $0. It's only available on Windows. The UI UX, I gave it a four out of five because it was so easy to use. I think everyone will get how to do it. There's really, it really just does stacking. So it's just something where there's not a lot of distraction. You really know how to work it. But I wish it used more standard language for darks and flats. There was no way to use bias frames like Registar. I couldn't find any way to use bias frames. And there were no advanced options in terms of stacking. So for features, it got a two out of five. For speed, it was incredibly fast. It got a four out of four because it did everything in two minutes, 34 seconds. Sort of crazy how fast that is. The final result was my least favorite out of all of them. And I'll show you why. It did something crazy here with the calibration. For one thing, it wasn't linear coming out of it. It was stretched. And then the bigger concern was it just didn't apply the darks and flats correctly at all. I think maybe it's because it's not using bias frames but I think there's something even bigger going on here because you can just see so much vertical banding where none of the other results had that happen. So I'm using all the exact same data. Again, of course I couldn't use bias frames with sequader. So that's one difference. But otherwise I'm using all the same data and it gave me this crazy amount of noise. So I don't know. I don't think I can recommend sequader for deep sky stacking. I still think for Milky Way, it's a nice program and I hope to do a tutorial on it for that. But for deep sky, I wouldn't recommend it. Okay, and last but certainly not least, we have Cyril. And Cyril is, I think, working very hard on modernizing their UI with the version one release. They did this overhaul to the user interface where it's now unified before they had floating windows. So I think they're doing a lot of really nice active development on this program. And they've tried to sort of simplify the menuing system by just having everything here, sort of an image processing, a nice viewer here in the middle and then it tells you what it's doing over here with these windows and the console. One thing you do sort of have to know about it, but it does, when you first launch it, after downloading it, it does have this nice sort of welcome where it tells you these things is you have to set a working directory by going up here to the little home icon. You set a working directory of where you want it to save things and then you have to know that the easiest way to do stacking is through the scripts. So, and then you have to sort of know how the scripts work. So it's not a super easy user interface, user experience, but it's not that bad because it works. So once you know how it works, it works well and it can be quite easy once you know how it works. Okay, let's look at the chart. So for serial cost three out of three, zero dollars, it is available on all the operating systems. I gave it a two out of five. You know, the sample scripts do work very well once you know how to use them, but I would not call it intuitive without some kind of instructional material to guide you through it. For the features, I gave it a two out of five. The feature that's really missing is what is provided by an add-on called Cyrillic, but that's only available in the Windows version. So I didn't include it as being, I don't know, I sort of went back and forth if I should include that as being part of the program. It's, I think it's by outside developers. So I sort of wish that they would have a built-in GUI system for pre-processing, like many of these others, like Pixinsight has this WBPP, DeepSkyStacker has lots of GUI options. So it has ASTAP, most everything, except for Registar at this point, has pre-processing beyond just scripts. Now, some people, you know, are gonna prefer just that it just has scripts and that they find that easier. So I'm not saying that this score is representative of all people, but it's, for me, it's, I'm giving it a two out of five there. And for speed, it was the fastest out of all eight. It finished in two minutes, 25 seconds. So that's outstanding. For final result, I gave it a seven out of 10. I thought it was very on par with Astropixel processor, where they were both sharp, but they both had more visible noise than Pixinsight or ASTAP to my eye zooming in. Okay, if you're still with me, we've now reached the final sort of comparisons. And let's go back to the chart and here are the totals for everything. I'm glad that Pixinsight squeaked it out because I think the final result was very impressive. And then just also the features, the feature set is so impressive that even though it's a little bit on the slow side, I think that for me, at least, it is worth stacking in Pixinsight, but I understand that not everyone would find it worth the $230 that they charge just for that, but it does have other features. The ones, I wasn't surprised that Cyril also scored very highly on this chart because it has just covered a lot of bases very well. Deep Sky Stacker is also up there, but the one that was a big surprise to me was ASTAP. I didn't know much about this program. I only heard recently that it was even used for stacking. I mean, I guess it's in the name, but when you figure out what this acronym means, but I'd only heard of ASTAP for doing plate solving because I know of it as one of the only offline plate solvers that works really well with DSLRs. So it has a lot of features, but now I know stacking with a full GUI that covers all the basics is one of them, and the result was amazing. For just this free program that not many people are using, it was really, really impressive. So that was my sleeper hit is ASTAP. Some people are going to maybe be mad that Astropixel processor and Affinity Photo didn't finish at the top, but I don't know. For me, Astropixel processor was slow and then the result was sort of on par with Cyril, which was 10 times faster. So I don't know if I would use that for stacking. I do use it for mosaic building. So the thing is a lot of these programs, they're gonna be good at one thing. So I'm not mad that I have them all, but in terms of stacking, I don't think I would necessarily use that one. And then Affinity Photo, again, this is sort of a cool program. It can do all of these things all in one package. So if you're already someone who really likes Photoshop, like me, having a stacker built in is pretty nice. So, and then in terms of the ones that I wouldn't recommend for at least DeepSky stack, calibration, registration, stacking, those two are Registar and Sequater. It's possible I did something wrong, but I don't think so, and they just didn't really deliver good results. Okay, we've gone through all of my description of the programs and their user interfaces and their feature set, but now let's just take a look at the final results full screen. And now some cropped in comparisons. And the way that I made these, I should point out, is I did all of the same kind of basic processing on each one, exactly the same. So I did photometric color calibration and a stretch, you know, just a histogram stretch that was the exact same on each one to get these results. And I should also point out that I'm going to make all of these files available. So just look in the description for a link to a Google Drive folder with all of the files for you to take a look at because I know that YouTube does some compression. So small differences that I'm talking about and seeing here might not be apparent in the YouTube video, but if you're very interested and want to take a look yourself, you can download those TIFs and take a look. And you're now seeing all of my current members on my Patreon campaign. If you want to see your name in the credits, you can sign up over on patreon.com slash nebula photos. It has a bunch of benefits outside of your name and the credits of long videos. I have made some exclusive videos for Patreon. There's monthly Zoom chats. There's a discord community where you can ask questions. There's monthly imaging challenges. There's imaging projects with a group. And of course, there's direct way to message me with all of your comments and questions. So if you like these videos, you want to learn more and learn faster, consider joining over there on Patreon for as little as $1 a month. Again, the link is patreon.com slash nebula photos. Until next time, this has been Niko Carver, Clear Skies.