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.
I have a reasonable understanding of how one takes the lights and calibration frames from a session, or a series of sessions, and crunches them to yield an integration (and, for us mono dudes, a RGB composition).
Given that APP does not have a "reload exactly where I left off" option, what are the best practices for projects that I work on for weeks at a time? For example I'm six imaging sessions deep into my current project, but it's not like I'm going to wait for everything to be done before I load up all the frames and go for it.
One obvious win is to ensure that the master flats get labeled per session so I can just load those. But what about the other steps I've already done for earlier frames? In particular, what exactly happens when I click "save normalized frames" with "apply registration to frames" checked? Can I just load, calibrate, analyze, register, and normalize new frames as they come in, and then load everything into one massive pile for integration? Do the various scores (e.g. quality, SNR, FWHM) get saved and pulled in when I reload them? When I click "save normalized frames", are they already calibrated so I don't have to do that again, or do I have to re-assign masters and re-calibrate?
Thanks for the help.
PS: Just in case it's unclear: I do understand that trying to integrate previous integrations is not useful.
I guess if I just looked at the saved frames, some of my questions would be answered. But that's one reason I posted them, there are probably other people wondering the same thing. Clearly the frames are saved with calibration intact, since the horrendous IMX-183 amp glow appears to be gone.
Still, the "what happens" explanation would be welcome.
I think it is beneficial to integrate previous sessions, why wouldn't that be ok? It would give you more data, more signal etc.
The saving of projects and settings is very clearly the way to go for your workflow and a lot of others. Mabula is very aware of that and will start to implement options for this going forward (not the next release yet though). The next release will have the possibility to skip certain steps, so when you save registered frames for example, you can set APP to skip that part.
I think it is beneficial to integrate previous sessions, why wouldn't that be ok? It would give you more data, more signal etc.
Oh, of course. But you would re-integrate the individual lights together with any new data, not take the result of e.g. three previous sessions' processing and load those three FITS files as lights or something. Right?
Man them normalized & registered suckers are BIG. (249 MB per "saved normalized frame" instead of 40, for me). So now re-integrating them, should I wish to, should be a one-step process -- or is that still in the future? My other question about that is how the registration would work. If I shot another series of frames, perhaps with the camera rotated or the FOV offset by a smidgen, would it be enough to run their processing up through "normalize" and then save the normalized frames? Could I then load them together with the previously-normalized lights and jump straight to integration? Or is that exactly the feature that you're talking about for the next release?
Thanks again.
