Astrophotography: Processing Galaxies with PixInsight

Get over the hurdle of PixInsight’s complexity and learning curve, and apply it to make your galactic astro-images awesome.

 

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PixInsight is a powerful tool, but with a steep learning curve. If you’re ready to take your astrophotography to the next level, this course will de-mystify PixInsight and unleash its potential for you. Even if you’re an experienced PixInsight user, I think you’ll find some tips, tricks, and scripts you may not have encountered before.

We’ll walk through the processing of the galaxy M61, a distant, challenging target that includes an image of a recent supernova! As we go, we’ll cover:

• Installing my PixInsight process icons and third-party scripts to simplify things
• Identifying and discarding bad sub-frames with the Blink process
• Calibrating your frames across multiple nights using the WeightedBatchPreprocessing script
• Weighted stacking with WeightedBatchPreprocessing
• Linear noise reduction with MURE Denoise
• Cropping your integrated images
• Creating luminance, range, and star masks
• Sharpening your image with deconvolution
• Background extraction
• Color combination, luminance integration, and photometric color correction
• Stretching into non-linear space while preserving star colors
• Nonlinear noise reduction with TGVD Denoise
• Aesthetic tweaking with RGB and saturation curves
• Shrinking and re-shaping stars with MorphologicalTransform
• Annotating your images
• Final tweaks in Photoshop

This walkthrough uses monochrome data collected over 3 nights using luminance, red, green, and blue color filters. But many of these techniques will be the same if you’re using a color camera as well.

Don’t let PixInsight’s unusual user interface and complexity scare you off – it’s worth learning, and can really take your images to the next level.

Course Instructor

Frank Kane Author

Frank spent 9 years at Amazon and IMDb, developing and managing the technology that automatically delivers product and movie recommendations to hundreds of millions of customers, all the time. Frank holds 17 issued patents in the fields of distributed computing, data mining, and machine learning. In 2012, Frank left to start his own successful company, Sundog Software, which focuses on virtual reality environment technology, and teaching others about big data analysis.

 

Buy This Course

$24.99

Learn at your own pace! Lifetime access to all videos and materials for this course, with a one-time payment.

Enroll