Few problems with APP 1.09

Posted by: @shlomi

Hi,

I am using a mono camera (ASI1600), and recently has been upping my total integration time. Since this camera is very sensitive and I am capturing data from a light polluted are, I have rather short exposures (30s).

I am seeing a few problems that I would like to bring to your attention:

1. When having a large number of lights, almost every operation opens a dialog called "Constructing Frame List panel", which takes a while to close. Operations like viewing a different image, changing the viewer mode makes this happen which makes these ops take a very long time.

2. "Crop" during integration is a bit brittle. It worked some of the times, other times I got the application completely stuck, and could do nothing on it until I terminated it. At some point I started to crop and than changed my mind and attempted to cancel it - APP did not like that at all. Other times I selected one crop section, but the integrated image was of the same size but at a different location

3. Drizzle sometimes behaves strangely. It worked well for me one time, then attempting it again shows really strange artifacts:

  1. If I show the registered image that is what I see:

  2. If I zoom in on it it gets weirder (that is a different image with a different strange pattern):

    However, a near by section showing only calibrated but not registered:

  3. And the zoomed integrated image:

However, doing nothing different gave me proper results at other times on the same data, but this is inconsistent.

 

Thanks for your hard work on this product, and for taking the time to help us as well. 

Shlomi

Hi Shlomi @shlomi,

Apologies for the late response. I will try to answer your questions:

1) that issue was actually properly fixed in 1.080

https://www.astropixelprocessor.com/community/release-information/astro-pixel-processor-1-080-ready-for-download/

IMPROVED/FIXED, UPDATING FRAME LIST PANEL AND SORTING OF FRAMES, updating of the frame list panel at the bottom of the user interfaces has been greatly improved. It is much faster now. If you load more than 500 frames, then after the star analysis step, the updating and sorting on the analytical result for all frames would start to take several seconds in the old APP version. With more than 1000 frames, it really becomes very slow ! This problem is now completely solved. The updating and sorting on analytical results is now almost instant, even with more than 1000 frames loaded and analysed.

2) if you crop the reference for the field of view of the integration with the 6) integrate composition mode, you need to draw the reectangle and then confirm with a red button in 6) iintegrate, then APP will show the field of view of the crop of the reference in the l-c-r-normalised image viewer mode. I use this reguarly myself, and it always works without issues. Perhaps you can be a bit more elobarate about what you exactly do? Perhaps you don't confirm the crop, then yes, things will be stuck until you confirm the crop.

3) This is not strange at all what you are seeing in the images 1-3, that actually is what drizzle is supposed to do 😉 APP is showing you those weird patterns in the registered image viewer because the drizzle is done like it would in the integration and those patterns are completely and 100% drizzle characteristics. It completely depends on the registration parameters (rotate, translate etc) and the drizzle parameters of scale, kernel and droplet size.

The integration however looks to have artefacts as well, which it shouldn't if you used

1. plenty of frames (more than 50), I think you did way more than that, so check !
2. if you dithered between all the frames, did you use dithering?

Perhaps you can share what drizzle settings you used, which drizzle kernel, which scale and which droplet size on how many images?

Mabula

Hi @mabula-admin, thank you so much for taking the time to respond!

1. I will rerun it with >1.08 version, thanks!

2. I no longer remember fully, but I did not accept the crop for a while, which caused problems. When I finally got that I missed accepting and accepted it, things started to behave strangely.. However, that is hardly precise enough for you to take any actions, so I will hold off on this until I try it again and give more concrete steps.

3. Thanks for explaining about why it may look this way. I thought it might be it, but then I was really surprised that the end results were very bad too on that particular attempt.. I used the default kernel, and did the 0.5/x2 to get similar results to drizzle x2 in other software.

  a. Oh yeah, I took 30 seconds subs for 6 hours 🙂 WAY more than 50! lol

  b. I do drizzle very heavily. Not every frame when doing 30 secs exposures, but every 3-4 frames. I typically do "RRRGGGBBB<Drizzle>+" (regex terms ;)) to save some imaging time.

Just wanted to mention how happy I am with this software, it is very capable and very easy. Sure there's a lot to improve (what would I give for "save project" feature ;)). I view these bug reports that I make as an effort at helping this wonderful product improve. Thank you for making it!!