UPDATE FROM MABULA
I have had a very rough 2 months unfortunately health wise. I was struck 3x in a row with bacterial infections. The second infection occurred after a routine hospital checkup and I became very sick. I had to rest and take a lot of antibiotics. Once I was recovering and restarting work 1 month ago, I again became sick. The infection was not yet gone, so even more antibiotics and rest was needed. Needless to say, it took a lot of my energy and I needed a lot of rest.
Finally, the infection is really gone and my energy is coming back step-by-step now and I have started work again. I am terribly sorry to have kept you waiting for support. I will address all outstanding questions and e-mails step-by step and will be on the forum daily from today.
APP 2.0.0-beta47 will come soon as well, a lot of work was already completed before I became very ill, so the release is also nearly ready for you. Beta47 will be much faster actually. Many workflows will be more than 2x faster, mosaics can even be 10x faster than before because registration really received a major boost... all compared to beta46. Before I release it, I will make sure that everything is working properly and then I will release it.
Hi all.
I am doing RGB frames at 120s, dualband frames at 180s, in Bortle 5-6.
Per session some 60-100 frames. In total, I do 10+ hours integration, so mostly >300 frames, up to 1000.
For a single session, I need to discard all frames with satellite trails. (Of course, I also discard frames with clouds, airplanes, guiding problems, and very strong satellite trails). If I leave a single satellite frame in, I see the trail in the stacked result.
Usually, I have
- very few, only 2-3% of really unusable frames (wind, airplane)
- but 15-20% of frames with satellite trails. So a lot, worthwhile to think, whether/how to keep those.
I am using still 2.0.0 beta39, my parameters are:
- RGB: adaptive airy disk, in 5) no neutralize background, in 6) LNC 1st, 3 iterations, bayer/x-trans drizzle, scale 1, droplet 1. Rest standard
- Dualband: Multi-NB extract Ha+OIII, 5) no neutralize background, 6) LNC off, rest standard.
- I tested (in beta39) a lot with 5) neutralize background and 6) LNC ...
... and came to the conclusion that the above settings are best as input to PixInsight's processes to correct the gradient (MARS, GradientCorrection, DBE). If I „smooth“ more in APP, I either loose faint details (e.g. IFN) or get worse gradient correction results.
(I use APP for stacking only.)
My questions:
- Are there any better settings to eliminate satellite trails, for one session, 60-100 frames ?
- If I have 200+, or 300+ frames: Does it make sense to leave the satellite frames in? Will the trails be „outliner-ed“?
- Is beta42 better in removing satellite trails?
Thank you and best regards.
Michael
Hi Michael, @michaelacg
I think beta42 will work better because it has improved outlier rejection with Local Normalization 2.0 rejection. In my tests it is better to remove outliers while preserving signal.
If you stack in APP with the automatic setting in 6) integrate, the outlier rejection settings can be too conservative. So what you want to do is set the integration mode to average instead of automatic and then tweak the outlier rejection settings yourself.
If you have many frames, the most important adjustment will be to decrease the kappa high relative to the kappa high used in automatic mode. You can find that kappa in the FITS header of an integration that was done in automatic mode. With many images, that kappa will be 4.0, better to lower it to 3.0-3.5 and see if that removed all the outliers then properly. Also enable the outlier rejection output map for visual feedback on what is rejected 😉
Let me know if this helps,
Mabula
