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.
I've been using APP (2.0.0-beta13) happily for a v long time, but a v strange thing has happened today.
When I calibrate my lights, the image is blurry. I've done the registration. If I integrate the calibrated files in Pixinsight, the PI image is not blurry. When I look closer it looks like APP is registering on perhaps some hot pixels rather than the actual stars. So I thought perhaps a new Bad Pixel Map was needed.
I created that new BPM, and then did a test stack of 5 lights, and the image was sharp again w no blurs. But when I added the rest of the lights, the image comes out blurry again. So I tested it again by asking APP to integrate the original 5 lights again, and this time it came out blurry!
So the same 5 lights, when integrated on two occasions in APP came out with two different results - in one the registration worked on the stars and the final image was sharp. In the other I suspect the software registered on calibrating pixels (as those are sharp but the stars blurry in the integrated image).
Any idea what's going on and how to get the stacking to happen properly? (The weird thing is that integrating lights from two days ago on the same target with the same camera and the same filter was fine w APP, as was integrating a different target today with a different filter). I really don't want to have to go back to other tools b/c APP has been so fantastic to use.
Thank you!
Try turning up your stars to 2000 and maybe turning on cosmic ray/noise reducer on tab 3.
Thanks @imnewhere but sadly no joy with either of those. Tried both, and blurry each time. I see that someone reported a blurry integration result a few months back as well.
I think the problem is one of APP taking some background red and blue pixels (it's a narrow dualband filter on an OSC camera) as stars. When I ran it at 2000 stars it reported FWHM of 2.00-2.03 consistently which is way too tight and not in bearing to the actual stars (normal FWHM is around 2.5). So its taking those pinpoints, thinking they are stars and then registering around those.
@Mabula any ideas? Thanks.
So based on the hunch in the reply above, I actually reduced the number of stars to 100 - idea being to force APP to stick to things that more clearly the bigger stars. And the test stack of 5 lights then integrated fine without blurs. I have the full night's image stacking now (with registration restricted only to 100 stars) so let's see what happens!
Did you try "Cosmic Ray" enable with 10 to 25 in value, in star analysis ?
This option appears since beta 10 (I asked for it because I got issues with long focal telescope with FWHM typicaly around 4 pixels).
Since this option, it works fine.
So reducing the number of stars in tab 3 to 100 from 500 worked, and the all the lights were stacked and integrated without blurring. Quite interesting - first time this has happened. Will keep that in mind for future targets - I wonder what it was about the lights on this target on this night that made this happen (same target on different nights has not shown this).
