PixInsight

Wow, what a complicated app this is. While researching software I looked into a lot of applications and there are so many each with plus and minus points, but I settled on PixInsight because it seemed to do everything in one application. The only downside is the learning curve but there seems to be a good community out there so I knew I would be supported. Currently, it takes me longer to process the images than it does to capture them. Here in the UK, the nights are currently short so imaging time is a premium.

In my first efforts, I thought I should try to process my images in a simple fashion, I will keep my original files so that I can go back and reprocess them once I have learned more.

For now, my process is.

• Blink – Go through all lights, darks and flats and discard any with artefacts that will affect the final image
• Batch Processing – There are few to choose from but I selected Weighted Batch Processing to preprocess and calibrate the frames
• Blink – Use blink to go through the de-bayered light frames and select the best one to be used as the reference frame
• Star Alignment – Aligns all the light frames to the reference frame
• Integration – Stacks all the frames
• Dynamic Crop – Trim the edge from the resulting frame so it doesn’t mess up the next processes
• Dynamic Background Extraction – Removes gradient from image (The green if using a colour camera)
• Photometric Colour Calibration – Balance the colour channels
• Deconvolution – Improves clarity in high-signal areas of the image
• Linear Noise Reduction