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.
I am seeing a lot of blochiness and uneven gradients in my mosaic - this does not appear to be easily correctable (or at least I have not found any way in APP to fix it) Is there a suggested set of settings to resolve that?
Most likely, a lot of things that you refer to can be fixed/corrected in APP, but I will need to see the data. Can you upload an image or two showing the problems? And...
1) have you used a BPM in calibration?
2) in 6) integrate, have you used both MBB and LNC ?
3) Did you correct the individual mosaic panels for gradients first?
- I have already tried to use the 'Remove light pollution' on each, ( but they could probably be flatter) For some reason the mosaic tool is adding additional gradients, and giving a strange distorted result.
My settings:
1) - no didnt do a bad pixel map.
2) in 6 -I'm using 1st degree LNC, and 3 interations, although I played with this and added more, but it didnt seem to help.
I have just retried this again, after quitting out and restarting. The strange anomaly on the bottom right is gone, but the dark blotches remain. I don't see these gradients in the separate files, but perhaps they are there but just not as visible when the files are viewed?
- I have already tried to use the 'Remove light pollution' on each, ( but they could probably be flatter) For some reason the mosaic tool is adding additional gradients, and giving a strange distorted result.
My settings:
1) - no didnt do a bad pixel map.
2) in 6 -I'm using 1st degree LNC, and 3 interations, although I played with this and added more, but it didnt seem to help.
3) Yes I tried as best I could.
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Hi Tim,
I'll have a look at the 4 panels.
For some reason the mosaic tool is adding additional gradients
The actual mosaic registration will never alter the illumination of the data. A tool like LNC can however, because it tries to correct the illumination differences between the panels.
and giving a strange distorted result.
That will happen if dynamic distortion correction is unstable in registration. This happens usually when distortion correction is not really needed, but i'll try to figure out what's going on.
Done with APP 1.057 which is about to be released.
3) Analyse stars
To be able to have good registration of your mosaic, we want to detect more stars than for a non-mosaic situation. So I increased:
automatic minimum #stars target to 1000
automatic maximum #stars target to 10000 ( the amount of stars in your frames isn't very big, this ensures almost all available stars are analysed and used)
4) Register
change scale stop to at least 10 (this is needed for mosaics)
use dynamic distortion correction
disable same camera and optics
registration mode to mosaic
5) Normalize
set mode to advanced (for mosaics usually preferred)
6) Integrate
first I did an integration with default settings, only enable the normalization output map to see how data normalization is working.
I think that the initial distorted lower-right panel probably happened due to too little stars detected in 3) analyse stars with default settings. So for a mosaic, try to have more stars detected if registration is problematic. More stars means more registration points, making registration more robust. (On the other side, detecting more than 5000 stars in panels usually is overdone and will only slow down registration)
In a next post, I'll study the LNC + MBB correction on your data to make a nice seamless mosaic
Yes, I see that correcting the panels with LNC + MBB is a bit problematic.
Chances are that this is due to your Light Pollution Correction (LPC) on the initial panels, so it is worthwile if you could also share the panels without LPC so I can have a look at those to verify if that works better.
Anyway, this is what I get with LNC 2nd degree 10 iterations and MBB at 15%:
We see your problem, the black area. We also see that the normalization map shows that normalization is problematic, we expect it to be smooth, but it isn't. Data normalization is not working. To me, this could indicate that the initial Light Pollution Correction is not done properly and has introduced new gradients that are very unnaturel. I can only confirm this if I can have a look at the panels before Light Pollution Correction. Can you share those?
Dropbox File (Private or Invalid)
