PixInsight Blogs

NGC 7331 with the 3.5m Zeiss Telescope of Calar Alto Observatory and the LAICA camera, by Vicent Peris (PTeam/OAUV). Entirely processed with PixInsight version 1.2.

This image of NGC 7331 and its surrounding galaxies is my first astrophotographic work with Calar Alto Observatory (CAHA). First I must thank Joao Alves, the Director of the Observatory, because the data for this work have been acquired during his discretionary observational time. Also thanks to Gilles Bergond, the service astronomer who acquired the data, and to David Galadí-Enríquez, who wrote the image release published at Calar Alto’s website. Finally, thanks to Vicent J. Martínez, ex-Director of the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Valencia (OAUV), the institution where I work as a professional astrophotographer.

For me, this image is just a starting point. The work of scientific photographers is important for the public outreach of astronomical research. The CAHA and the OAUV have given a first step; I hope this cooperation will continue from now on as a contribution to the excellent science communication activities performed by both institutions.

To know more about the objects present in this image, you can read the official image release published at Calar Alto Observatory’s website.

This image integrates a total of 139 minutes of exposure time. It is composed of 1-minute and 10-minute exposures that I have combined to create a linear, high dynamic range image. I have written a processing example, available on PixInsight’s website, which describes the whole processing of this image.

Besides taking pretty (open for interpretation pictures I used to spend some time doing asteroid occultation work. The other day David Dunham contacted me to attempt an event because the weather in Connecticut had cleared up. I was a little rusty but I succeeded in recording the event with my M110 with video camera, time stamp inserter (KIWI) and capture box. My initial analysis resulted in time stamps that closely matched a subsequent more rigorous statistical method. Here is a summary of the event. My ‘chord’ is number 9. Together with other measurements an estimate of the asteroid’s size was calculated.

Profile

Hi all,

Open image file window show, sometimes and at least in my computer, a very strange behavior:

Please see the aspect, just after start up the program:

http://img152.imageshack.us/img152/6872/01iniciowu2.jpg

This subdirectory (the last used in previous session) shows no file but is not empty at all!!

After pressing green up arrow (parent directory) and left green arrow (back), the files appear:

http://img152.imageshack.us/img152/1086/02iniciozs1.jpg

Another small problem is this. Once I get the files, if I press “Date modified”, files are sorted by date but not by time:

http://img152.imageshack.us/img152/6320/03inicioaj7.jpg

Regards

Jordi

Hello guys,

this is an off topic application to PI.

Well in our job we have a lot of renderizated images from my CFD simulations, usually the renderization is done with paraview (http://www.paraview.org). An standard result is like this image,

http://astrosurf.com/brego-sky/images/InitCyl-7.png

We have been playing with PI to achieve a more  realistic picture of this simulations. After using an special method developed by Carlos Sonnenstein to do maskings of the dark structures of an image. And applying to this mask a HDRWavlets and a MTF we have this result:

http://astrosurf.com/brego-sky/images/InitCyl-DarkMask-HDR-mtf.png

We are really happy with the result, in fact is very similar to the traditional snapshots from experimental facilities.  But in this case this is a numerical simulation (8 Milions of elements using 160 cpu’s and a week of cpu time).

Well we known that this is an absolutely off topic post, but we are really happy with the effectivity of PI even with this non-astronomical images!

Regards

Hi all,

I have just finished alignment of 80 images taken on 5 different nights (4 filters) with very promising results.

I cannot show you now results but I will try to post some tomorrow. In a first view, however, FWHM of stars is lower that previous alignment performed with CCDSoft, and I have been also able to align L,R,G and B images against one single reference (while CCDSoft clearly failed here)

Regards

Jordi

I will start this off with a reminder of the upcoming Advanced Imaging Conference (AIC) in San Jose, Calif on November 14 to 16th.  Reason I bring this up here is there will be a Basic workshop on Friday the 14th on PixInsight.  The purpose will be to introduce interested astronomers to this great piece oif image processing software.  But if there are other PixInsight users there we can share ideas and techniques.

http://www.aicccd.com/

I know this has been on the forum but it continues to be a constant irritant to me.  When you close PixInsight and open a new instance you get instance 2, or 3, etc.  With these new instances you lose your presets such as postion of Process Explorer, Favorites in Process Explorer, etc.  So two issues.  FIrst with the ability to open more than one work area why do we need to be able to open several instances of PixInsight?  Second, if we are going to keep this function we need an easy way to delete the multiple instances as constantly going to regedit, etc is very cumbersome.  Also I think there is a way to save the presets, such as position of process explorer, favorites etc, but I cannot find the reference to it.  Thanks