At the request of several people, here is the current revision of my PixInsight workflow document. I started compiling this soon after I felt I was beginning to get to grips with PixInsight, but finding that if I didn’t write down all of the steps I just couldn’t remember exactly how everything worked. This revision was…
M27 From Oregon Star Party 2016
The end result of all of that calibration workflow stuff I posted about a couple of days ago (plus many, many other processing steps). This is the planetary nebula M27, also known as the Dumbbell Nebula, in the constellation Vulpecula. It is the remains of a dying white dwarf star about 1,360 light years away…
PixInsight Calibration Workflow Part 1 : Process Overview
This is the start of a write-up of my current PixInsight calibration workflow. I’ve spent quite a bit of time getting to understand how PixInsight calibration works, and this is what I’ve come up with after much experimentation and helpful insights from several people on the PixInsight forums. This workflow now produces results that are…
Brief Gear Rundown
It will take a few posts to go through my entire astro-imaging rig, but for now here is a brief rundown of the outdoor setup. I will write some additional posts later that explain the control system that I use to run everything. My setup has gone through many iterations, but in it’s current form…
M63 from Oregon Star Party 2016
Finally processed this data of M63, the Sunflower Galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici. This required quite a bit of work in PixInsight to fix residual gradients, and it has taken me a while to get to the point where I have a final image that I’m happy with. As always, I’m sure I will…
Gamma Cygni Nebula from Oregon Star Party 2015
Still reprocessing old data using PixInsight, now that I have a better idea of the process flow. This data was captured at Oregon Star Party last year, but my initial processing (using Maxim DL) was not particularly satisfactory. No doubt I will come back to this again at some point as I add additional steps…
PixInsight Workflow First Pass
As mentioned in an earlier post, I have found it necessary to write out a formal workflow for PixInsight to map out the process. I started out with a pretty bare bones workflow and subsequently added in various additional steps as I became familiar with each of the tools. As of the time of writing,…
NGC5905 & NGC5908 from Oregon Star Party 2016
This is the best process so far of just over 4 hours of data featuring the pair of galaxies NGC5905 and NGC5908 in the constellation Draco. These are extremely faint galaxies (both magnitude 12) and pulling a good image from the background noise is extremely challenging, even with several hours of data. I will probably…
Adventures with PixInsight
I have recently switched fully over to using PixInsight for image post-processing, and given the superior results, am busy going back over old data and reprocessing. PixInsight has a very steep learning curve, and I am by no means at a point where I can claim to be an expert. I strongly suspect that I…
M33 from Oregon Star Party 2014
Getting caught up with old data. This is a reprocess of M33 from last year’s Oregon Star Party. This took me quite a while to get processed correctly because I messed up the capture due to incorrectly noting the position of the filters in my filter wheel. I had positions 1 – 4 of the…