Using the latest beta I get sharp comet but 3 /4 starry smudges.

I was on a previous version, I think maybe beta26 or somesuch, so I installed the latest and still getting the same error in the same spot when its on the Registration sequence. I get the popup asking if I want to use the timestamps to help more accurately track the comet, I've tried both yes and no, no change. I am not even getting to the point where I get prompted to select the comet.

Ok, well, it did finally go through, I kept changing settings on other stuff and then it finally accepted it. I think it was having issues with the Dynamic Distortion Correction settings, as well as the Registration Model needed to be on Projective. Not that I've had the dynamic distortion settings really do anything to help with my wider shots anyways, as they always end up distorted like crazy if different.

Ok, so the first result doesn't look great, as if it def got the center wrong on a few subs, looks like there's some ghosted tails in there.

I guess now I have to figure out how to get a clean "comet" shot and a clean "stars" shot to combine for a final image. So its working, ish.

How do I ovbercome this?

It came to mind that if you follow the suggested comet registration and processing steps, but before step 6) INTEGRATE, you one-for-one replace all your subs with ones you ran Starnet on, you don't end up with star trails. Make sure you have backups of your original subs!

You do need to save all your FITS files as TIFF.

To do that I start by pre-processing my FITS files in 2) CALIBRATE (I go ahead and "align channels"), "SAVE (calibrated) Light frames."

From there, under "TOOLS" I batch save the calibrated files as TIFF.

I then start over in APP and load all the calibrated TIFFs and do comet registration workflow as recommended but stop after step 5) NORMAILZE. I then run Starnet on the calibrated files and copy them to the same location with he same names (overwriting the non-Starnet TIFFs), same filenames that I loaded into APP for the steps up to NORMALIZE... then run 6) INTEGRATE without comet recommended settings.

I've done this successfully on Linux. As long as the APP Windows/Mac versions don't keep the files open it should work there too.

Here is the bash shell script to run Starnet on the calibrated TIFF files, which adds "-snet" to each filename. My script is basic (I have saved it as /usr/local/bin/starnet.bash) , and I know it's broken if you have "snet" anywhere in the directory path of your source TIFF files:

##################################

#!/bin/bash

SOURCE_FILE=`realpath $1`
DEST_FILE=`echo $SOURCE_FILE | nawk -F.tiff '{print $1 "-snet.tiff"}'`

# Change directories to where Starnet is:
cd /usr/local/bin/StarNetv2CLI_linux
#echo $SOURCE_FILE $DEST_FILE

#Run Starnet
./starnet++ $SOURCE_FILE $DEST_FILE 256

#################################

The above script works on one file at time, so you need to do something like this from a bash shell if you have a lot of files:

for fits_file in "COMET_C-2021-S3*-snet.tiff" 

   do

    /usr/local/bin/starnet.bash $fits_file

done

Then you copy all those files back to overwrite the original directory/filenames (which is another shell script exercise if you have lots of subs); then you switch back to APP and run 6) INTEGRATE.

Dose anyone think APP will ever have the ability to do it all on its own.

Right now you have to process one normal (to stack the stars)  one on the comet.

Run through a 3rd party to remove the stars.    

Use another program to combine the stacked comet and the stars only.

Gets very convoluted.

1. Using this new beta release, APP asked me to “click comet nucleus” for every single frame (during the “comet/one-star” registration). In the prior release this did not happen. If memory serves me correctly, of the 67 frames, I only had to confirm comet nucleus 5 or 6 times in the last version.  Is this change intentional, a bug, or something that I have done incorrectly?
2. Are there any new “local normalization settings” recommended for processing comets using this new release?
3. Are there any specific tools or settings to minimize (or even eliminate) star trails from from the comet registered integration?

Thanks in advance for any input and guidance. 

1. Loaded light frames and calibration frames.
2. Ran everything up to Calibration step and saved calibrated frames.
3. In PixInsight, ran StarXTerminator in batch mode, which separated starless and star calibrated fits into separate folders
4. Loaded calibrated starless images (comet only) into APP and selected "Comet/1-star" registration mode
5. Clicked Register and got

6. Also, star analysis fails (maybe because of starless image or maybe because PixInsight messed up the FITS headers - the error doesn't tell what's wrong here) so I just disabled it. Should I be able to still perform star analysis and comet registration?

today I tried to do comet processing using APP version 2.0.0 beta 13 and got a java.lang.NullPointerException while pointing the comet during the registration process:

It happened twice around or perhaps even at the same image while clicking at the comet. I could not see which image it was. I had the image viewer full screen (1280 x 1048). Then I repeated the registration another time with the image viewer i partial view (approximately 800 x 600px) and the process continued happily.

Not sure if the above makes sense and is of some use, happy to do some further testing if needed.

Nicolàs

I have 151 light frames of C/2022 E3.

After processing it with correction frames of course, it seem to have 2 comets in the image. the one on the middle ist obvious but on the left side there appears a second one... Also we see different lenght in the startrails. These seem to correspond with the "second" comet.

Please give some help...

CS Peter