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. Â Before I release it, I will make sure that everything is working properly and then I will release it.
Hi Mebula, first I want to say that I use APP to stack all of my images and I find it to be very robust in handling many stacking situations.
Today I ran across ImageMM in a The Astronomical Journal paper by Yashil Sukurdeep, et al. They describe ImageMM as "a new framework based on the majorization–minimization (MM) algorithm for joint multi-frame astronomical image restoration and super resolution. ImageMM uses multiple registered astronomical exposures to produce a nonparametric latent image of the night sky, prior to the atmosphere’s impact on the observed exposures." Â
There are some discussions by a few individuals that this framework could be a game changer for image stacking. Also, an individual has incorporated ImageMM into his small suite of processes/programs. I do play on performing a back to back comparison of APP stack to this new method.
Would love to hear your thoughts. Thank you.
Hi Mabula,
I have used what I believed is the first implementation of the ImageMM integration method(with the setiAstro Pro suite) since it was released last week, and for me it has proven to be a significant improvement from the traditional integration way. The Integrated images are sharper from the start and this edge is maintained all through post processing, also after applying deconvolution software like BlurXterminator.
My approach has been to use APP all through registration and normalization, and then save the normalized files and load them into the SetiAstro suite's MultiFrame Deconvolution (ie the implementation of ImageMM) for integration. This has for me been a more successfull and efficient approach than to do everything within the SetiAstro suite.
The end result is the sharpest images I have managed to create with my equimpment( a C14 at F/7) so far. The improvements are significant enough that it will be difficult to go back to traditional integration.
The optimal scenarion of course is to be able to do ImageMM integration within APP 🙂
I could provide image examples if this is of interest.
Anders
Anders,
Thanks for bringing up the idea to use APP upto Normalization and use those images in SAS pro for ImageMM stacking.
I am a diehard APP user, but this gives new options as I got my graphics card activated (after some trial and error)
Hopefully Mabula will also give it a thought..
I would love to see this come to APP as APP is still by far the best program for integrating mosaic images. I do not get the same result when I integrate each panel separately then integrate together. Thus, using the Seti version, even if I work through normalization in APP isn't as good as being able to integrate with imageMM in APP.Â
