Really Amazing Star Reduction in Pixinsight

[Mike Lewis]

So for those of you using Pixinsight, I am going to include a link to a very cool and amazing easy to use and effective suite of star reduction scripts that use Pixel Math. Is this just a thinly veiled opportunity for me to repost some of my older stuff? (well, that is a nice side effect ) But no, this is a cool toolset for those PI users out there. This set of scripts are from a guy named Bill Blanshan, and are pretty revolutionary in their performance IMHO. They do require Pixinsight and the ability to create a starless copy I use either Starnet V2 or StarXterminator) of whatever image you are going to reduce the stars in. There are 3 different versions that all work well. The link is here, from a post in the Pixinsight forum:

https://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?threads/star-reduction-using-pixelmath.18855/

I am going back with some of my images and reprocessing them with this. The cool part is that this can be applied right at the end (even to the jpg file) and seems to give awesome results. Here is a comparison of the reprocess of my Lion Nebula image with the original (please excuse the slight cropping difference between the 2...)

Original Version:

Reprocessed Version:

This is using script version 3, with iterations 2 and method selected to 3 as well. You can go as subtle or aggressive as you like with these scripts. So if you have not heard of these, go download them, get them installed, and try them out!

ML

 

[JimFox]

Thanks Mike. That's good to know, and it's always great seeing your old images.

I am not using Pixinsight yet, but probably next year. Right now my focus is on really getting good and consistent with my new hardware. So I figure next year I can through Pixinsight into the mix with its steep learning curve.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Nice resault

 

[Mike Lewis]

Thanks Mike. That's good to know, and it's always great seeing your old images.

I am not using Pixinsight yet, but probably next year. Right now my focus is on really getting good and consistent with my new hardware. So I figure next year I can through Pixinsight into the mix with its steep learning curve.

Jim,

Sounds like a good plan. You seem to be making big strides with the hardware aspect of things.

I will be happy to be a Pixinsight consultant for you, and in reality, I think you will find it is not as hard to use as you have been lead to believe. The preprocessing scripts alone are worth the price of admission IMHO. They have been massively updated and improved over the last couple of years. And then for the rest of it, you will likely find you only need a subset of the rest of it on a mainstream basis.

ML

 

[CRTAstro]

Great result Mike ! I have been using default settings for PI's MorphologicalTransformation (and applying them more than once if necessary) for star reduction but will definitely give these scripts a go !

 

[Mike Lewis]

Great result Mike ! I have been using default settings for PI's MorphologicalTransformation (and applying them more than once if necessary) for star reduction but will definitely give these scripts a go !

Carlos,

I think you will be pretty amazed at the results. I used to also use MT but I really think this is more effective (especially on large stars) and also less destructive to the rest of the image.

ML