Udemy - Astrophotography: Processing Galaxies in PixInsight

Description

PixInsight is a powerful tool, but with a steep learning curve. If you’re ready to take your astrophotography to the next level, this course will de-mystify PixInsight and unleash its potential for you. Even if you’re an experienced PixInsight user, I think you’ll find some tips, tricks, and scripts you may not have encountered before.

We’ll walk through the processing of the galaxy M61, a distant, challenging target that includes an image of a recent supernova! As we go, we’ll cover:

Installing my PixInsight process icons and third-party scripts to simplify things
Identifying and discarding bad sub-frames with the Blink process
Calibrating your frames across multiple nights using the WeightedBatchPreprocessing script
Weighted stacking with WeightedBatchPreprocessing
Linear noise reduction with MURE Denoise
Cropping your integrated images
Creating luminance, range, and star masks
Sharpening your image with deconvolution
Background extraction
Color combination, luminance integration, and photometric color correction
Stretching into non-linear space while preserving star colors
Nonlinear noise reduction with TGVD Denoise
Aesthetic tweaking with RGB and saturation curves
Shrinking and re-shaping stars with MorphologicalTransform
Annotating your images
Final tweaks in Photoshop

This walkthrough uses monochrome data collected over 3 nights using luminance, red, green, and blue color filters. But many of these techniques will be the same if you’re using a color camera as well.

Don’t let PixInsight’s unusual user interface and complexity scare you off – it’s worth learning, and can really take your images to the next level.
Who this course is for:

Astrophotographers intimidated by PixInsight’s complexity and learning curve
Experienced PixInsight users looking for some new tips and tricks

Requirements

You should know the basics of deep sky astrophotography and how to acquire multiple sub-exposures of an object through your telescope. We only cover the processing of your images, not how to collect them.
You’ll need a copy of PixInsight (they have a free trial) if you’d like to follow along hands-on.
The sample data used in the course requires at least 6GB of hard drive space.

Last Updated 5/2020