PixInsight Process

First things first let’s check the quality of the light frames, as they say, rubbish in equals rubbish out.

Blink

Blink all the light frames and remove all the bad ones, don’t need to worry about satellites.

Cosmetic Correction

Set up Cosmetic Correction and enable the Auto-detect Hot Sigma and set the value to 3. Drag the process to the workspace.

Weighted Batch Pre-Processing

Add darks and dark flats to Dark, add light flats to flats, and add your source images to lights. No need for bias on CMOS cameras.

Enable CFA to both flats and lights

Under lights, select the cosmetic correction process we set up earlier, disable Image Registration, Local Normalisation and Image Integration.

In flats enable separate CFA flat scaling

Set the output directory

Star Alignment

Select a reference file from the debayered folder and add the rest of the debayered light frames.

Remove drizzle data

Set output directory

Image Integration

Add the aligned lights

Set combination to average, normalisation to Additive with scaling, and Weight to PSF

Under Pixel rejection 1, set the rejection algorithm to Winsorise

Under Pixel rejection 2, set Sigma High to 2.2 (This removes satellite transits)

Dynamic Background Extraction

Select a number of background samples

Set Tolerance to 5.0

Set Smoothness to 0.6

Set Target Image Correction to Subtraction

Photometric Colour Calibration

Click acquire from image to get target coordinates

Create a preview of the background as a sample

Set the upper limit to a higher number than the average background K number

Select the preview in the area of interest

Curve Transformation

Adjust the image to your liking