15th Feb 2024: Astro Pixel Processor 2.0.0-beta29 released - macOS native File Chooser, macOS CMD-Q fixed, read-only Fits on network fixed and other bug fixes
7th December 2023: added payment option Alipay to purchase Astro Pixel Processor from China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Korea, Japan and other countries where Alipay is used.
Just a note of praise for the APP ability to deal with mosiacs and especially random orientation framing from different sessions, scopes, cameras and camera angle. Here is the integrated stack of 8 hours for ngc 6888 taken from 3 sessions with 2 different cameras, one 12 bit micro 4/3) and the other 16 bit (APS-C). Completely different framing yet with correct LNC, rejection and registration/integration settings the raw stack looks perfect. Cannot o this with any other software form the raw subs in a single integration, even with two different bayer patterns (which the fits header rewriting was very useful in the new beta release).
Star reduction still too many artefacts to use, unfortunately, but the blending for integration is superb, even before any LPC of further APP 'tools' processing is done.
CS, Col
I have to agree, usually. My latest was a lot more of a challenge. I had LNC up to 4th degree and 3 iterations, MBB up to about 15%, but still got this. I finally just gave up and hacked it in Photoshop. Since the integrations were taking over an hour I couldn't try too many different sets of settings, although I suppose I could have tried it with subsets of subs.
That does look challenging. I had 2nd degree LNC, 2 iterations, MBB up to 15%. I disabled 'same camera and optics' obviously, but also increased the scale stop for registration to 10. At the same time, I ensure to have flip x/y descriptors checked. The only errors during the initial steps were at registration, and the scale stop and other choices fixed that before final integration. Mine is a OSC camera, but it worked for normal interploration and for drizzle since I undersample with this scope a bit.
I did try it with "same camera & optics" both on and off, with scale start at 1 and stop at 10.
I mean, this is just a torture test -- a glance at the center region and the Milky Way below is enough to confirm that! Center integration was from FITS files with three different sub lengths (15", 30", 600") at ISO 400, top and bottom margins are from the second night at ISO 1600 and 120" exposures.
It's pretty easy to see where the seam was in the final brutally-Photoshopped result, but if you don't have the original in front of you, it's possible to convince yourself that it's a sky transition and not just cutting the "good" portion off the bottom, moving it up to eliminate the dark trough, and then making with the Spot Healing like a D&D wizard in a boss fight.
Even the Light Pollution Correction tool struggled with the crazy gradients in this image. But I am not too unhappy with the result, all things considered.
