Astrophotography: Processing Galaxies in PixInsight

De-Mystify PixInsight and improve your astro-imaging. Includes process icons and practice data.

Astrophotography: Processing Galaxies in PixInsight
Astrophotography: Processing Galaxies in PixInsight

Astrophotography: Processing Galaxies in PixInsight udemy course free download

De-Mystify PixInsight and improve your astro-imaging. Includes process icons and practice data.

What you'll learn:

  • Using PixInsight to process deep sky galaxy images
  • Calibrating and integrating sub-exposures with WeightedBatchPreprocessing
  • Noise reduction with MURE Denoise and TGVD
  • Sharpening with Deconvolution and Photoshop's Smart Sharpening
  • Automatic Background Extraction
  • Color combination and calibration
  • Creating effective luminance and star masks
  • Aesthetic tweaking of your final image

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.

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:

Course Details:

Astrophotography: Processing Galaxies in PixInsight udemy courses free download

De-Mystify PixInsight and improve your astro-imaging. Includes process icons and practice data.

Demo Link: https://www.udemy.com/course/astrophotography-processing-galaxies-in-pixinsight/