Getting Started

Getting Started

An introduction video of Dark Master can be found here.

1. Note the location of your light files and dark files.

2. Open DarkMaster and click on the browse button (…) to select the folder where your lights are.
   

3. This will open a folder browser dialog. Navigate to your light folder.
   

4. Dark Master will load all images from the selected folder, read the exif data, and show you a list of files. Dark Master will "remember" the file lists so that the next time you run the program, the files already be loaded. To turn off this behavior, choose Help->Settings.
   

5. Click on the Darks tab and repeat these steps to load your dark frames. Note that you can select which files to include in the matching by checking or unchecking the file in the list. This applies to both Lights and Darks.
   

6. Now that you have lights and darks loaded, you need to decide what temperature range you want to group by, given by the “Temperature range tolerance” value. For example, if you enter “5”, then your lights and darks will be grouped together such that all files in the group (lights and darks) will be within 5C of each other.

7. Click “Go!” to have Dark Master perform its magic.

8. Once complete, you will be able to see the list of groups that Dark Master has created.
   

9. Click the “Create DSS File List” to save the list.

10. Open DeepSkyStacker and choose “Open a File List…” and select the file you just created.

11. DeepSkyStacker will load the files into Group 1, Group 2, etc. Note that the Main Group in DSS will be empty. This is where you will load common files such as flats or bias.