M51 Pixinsight Test - Watch me learn PI (Frank Schmitz)

M51 Pixinsight Test - Watch me learn PI

Link: https://www.astrobin.com/339134/O/

Here's my first attempt at using Pixinsight. I am skipping the calibration and integration step as I think that APP already does a fantastic job on that and I just wanted to see how PI's postprocessing (where everybody seems to be raving about) actually can do.

Tough little program if you are not used to it. The above image resulted mostly out of pure luck, watching two youtube tutorials and fiddling around with levers and buttons I don't understand. Especially the combination of the RGD data with Ha and Luminance was the biggest trouble ... APP is so much easier (and less time consuming) with that. I love the photometry color calibration but still not sure what I did wrong as the image above clearly can't represent the true color of M51.

However, this excersise was a lot of fun and I will use my 45 days trial to dive in a bit deeper into Pixinsight.

I deliberately decided to go for a full crop to see what kind of details I can get out or not. I do like how the Ha regions pop out now compared to my original M51 linked above.

Original
B
C
D
Final
E

C

Description: New (whole) evening, new processes, new image. This time tried TGV denoise, Masked Stretch, Multiscale Linear Transform. Probably in a completely wrong order :D Not happy with the big fat denoising blobs in the background. haven't figured out yet how to avoid them. must have come up somewhere in the denoise process.

Still think stacking and HaLRGB combination is muuuuuch easier and efficient in AstroPixelProcessor.

Uploaded: ...

D

Description: Here is attempt three. Thanks to Frank Breslawski for the sample LRGB, this really helped (I did everything in the wrong order before). The results are steadily getting better and better ;)

Uploaded: ...

E

Description: Bit brighter and tried out apf-r sharpening

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	1997015
PixInsight job	9UXK26HPIQJ1O04NGLYDJAU3P6S3BUNQ
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	13h29m47s.52
RA (top/left)	13h31m35s.84
RA (top/right)	13h31m24s.21
RA (bottom/right)	13h27m57s.87
RA (bottom/left)	13h28m12s.14

Dec (center)	+47°11′32″.5
Dec (top/left)	+46°52′14″.2
Dec (top/right)	+47°32′40″.0
Dec (bottom/right)	+47°30′44″.10
Dec (bottom/left)	+46°50′21″.3

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