Copyright © 2012-2020, Team free-astro <https://free-astro.org/index.php/Siril> <https://www.siril.org>
SIRIL is an astronomical image processing tool.
It is specially tailored for noise reduction and improving the signal/noise ratio of an image from multiple captures, as required in astronomy. SIRIL can align automatically or manually, stack and enhance pictures from various file formats, even image sequence files (films and SER files).
Contributors are welcome. Programming language is C, with parts in C++. Main development is done with most recent versions of libraries.
For compilation, these tools are needed:
- meson
- ninja
- cmake
Then, mandatory build dependencies:
- GTK+ 3, (>= 3.20) as GUI toolkit
- json-glib-1.0, (>= 1.2.6) as GUI toolkit
- cfitsio for FITS image read and write
- fftw3 for Fourier transforms
- GSL (The GNU Scientific Library) for PSF implementation, histograms and background extraction
- libconfig (>= 1.4) for structured configuration files
- A C++ compiler for opencv code and avi exporter
- libopencv for various image transformation algorithms (>= 4.4.0)
- exiv2 to manage image metadata
SIRIL works internally with FITS files, but other file formats can be used as input and converted using the conversion tab of the control window. Some file formats are handled internally, like BMP, PPM and SER, some require external libraries or programs listed below. Libraries need to be present at compilation time, or their support won't be included.
- libraw for DSLR RAW files import
- libffms2 for films import (any format supported by ffmpeg)
- libtiff (>= 4) for TIFF format support
- libjpeg or compatible libraries like libjpeg-turbo for JPEG format support
- libheif for HEIF format files import
- libpng (>= 1.6) for PNG format support
- libavformat, libavutil (>= 55.20), libavcodec, libswscale and libswresample for avi export (usually provided by ffmpeg)
- libcurl for web interaction. Useless on GNU-Linux MUST be installed on macOS and Windows platform as GIO is broken
- wcslib for some astrometry utilities
- criterion for unit testing
- gnuplot for photometry graphs output
All these libraries and programs are available in most Linux distributions and free systems, maybe with the exception of ffms2 that is not as popular as others and may need to be compiled.
SIRIL accepts commands from the graphical command line, from scripts as a file that contains a sequence of commands, or from a named pipe. The list of supported commands is documented here. We recommend to use the siril-cli binary for that as no X-server is needed.
Some general purpose scripts have been made by the developers and some power users, and are provided with the source code and some installers. When they are in some default directories or in the directories defined by the user in the settings, scripts appear in a top-menu of the main window. See this page for more information about scripts and a list of scripts ready for use.
The named pipe is only enabled when using SIRIL in a non-graphical way and when
the -p command is passed to the program command line.
You can get SIRIL source code from the release archives on their webpage, or the latest version from git:
git clone https://gitlab.com/free-astro/siril.git
So far, we are using submodule for the use of some algorithms. You must therefore run the following commands:
cd siril
git submodule sync --recursive
git submodule update --init --recursive
The process now uses the meson build system that is faster and more modern than autotools. However, meson build is still experimental so we encourage you to report bugs. Run with the following commands:
meson --buildtype release _build
ninja -C _build
sudo ninja -C _build install
To update Siril, run the following commands
git pull --recurse-submodules
sudo ninja -C _build install
Note that a binary package for stable version of SIRIL is maintained for Debian. PPA repositories for Ubuntu and Linux Mint maintained by SIRIL's authors are available in ppa:lock042/siril.
See the download page of the current version for other packages that could be available.
We provide a dmg installer on the website, but you can also install SIRIL from source using homebrew.
brew install siril
SIRIL is supported on Microsoft Windows since version 0.9.8. We provide binary files in two formats:
- an installer.
- an archive (zip file).
You can also build it from source yourself with msys2, it is documented here.
The translation system is based on intltool, common for GTK+ software, with the help of the poedit editor.
Get SIRIL sources. In the siril directory, run meson if not already done, then run
ninja siril-pot -C _build
Install poedit and open the siril.pot file in the po directory to start a new translation.
Proceed to the translation of the English elements in the list. When you want to stop or when you have finished, send us the .po file that you created and we'll include it in the next version's sources and packages.
If you want to work on an already existing language, run
ninja siril-update-po -C _build
to update po files and edit it with poedit.
Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) is an open standard defining a digital file format useful for storage, transmission and processing of scientific and other images. FITS is the most commonly used digital file format in astronomy.
Since FITS is a container and doesn't specify the order and size of data, it's useful to fix it at some point. Currently, SIRIL uses 32-bit floating point per channel values (TFLOAT), and images are stored channel after channel on a bottom-to-top, left-to-right order.
All files imported and converted in SIRIL or files exported by SIRIL are in this FITS format, except sequence files like SER and films, which are read from the file and converted on-the-fly. Films should be converted to SER now to process them, many parallel operations are unsupported on them.
SIRIL makes a strong case for the use SER sequences against the generic film containers that are not well suited for astronomy data and that may not be read the same way by different players. SIRIL can convert any film format supported by FFMS2 (probably all ffmpeg formats, which is a lot) to SER, and even any image sequence to SER.
SIRIL supports SER v3. See this page for more details.