I'm new to PixInsight and have been using it for about three weeks now. I photograph with a Canon EOS 40D and took my first set of astrophotos of the Leo Triplet with bias, flats, and darks. I've watched a bunch of video tutorials and read even more articles, tutorials, and forum posts and have seen a lot of conflicting information on the proper procedure to use. I've gotten messages such as
"Incremental image integration disabled due to lack of file format support: DSLR_RAW"
"Warning: The file format reports no CFA pattern for the master dark frame, but it is being forced as per process instance parameters."
"Ignoring 2 additional image(s) in master calibration frame."
"Warning: No correlation between the master dark and target frames (channel 0)."
when trying to use CR2 files and/or CR2 lights with FITS masters that were created with BatchPreProcessing. I've tried debayering first or after calibration. I've even tried this with the lights first converted to Bayer CFA FITS files. I always end up with very noisy calibrated lights and when I run StarAlignment, it sometimes works and sometimes it doesn't. I'm finding that the calibrated files have a lot of hot pixels along with the noise.
When I try to use ImageCalibration manually, I get calibrated lights that are totally black with a handful of hot pixels. When I measure the pixel values using the cursor, the non-hot pixel values are 0.000. If I calibrate with only the master dark or master bias, then the background is not black, just noisy with values around 0.1 to 0.16 depending on what was used for the calibration.
Can someone please provide a detailed flow that should work for this kind of camera?
Thanks,
Rick
