Has StarAlignment improved for mosaics in 1.8.5?

[kayronjm]

My standard workflow for constructing a mosaic has always been to create a rough mosaic with StarAlignment, with working mode set to "Register/Union - Mosaic" and "Frame adaptation" enabled. I then use StarAlignment again on the individual panels to align them to the rough mosaic with working mode "Register/Union - Separate", thereby resulting in all my panels being placed on a black image the size of the full mosaic. These are then put into GradientMergeMosaic, where the real mosaic construction happens. Of course, I end up spending upwards of an hour deleting stars by painting black over them so that the mosaic comes out right.

Now it seems, I'm using the same StarAlignment options as I always do but the aforementioned rough mosaic comes out without any seams, with nice equalised backgrounds, processes faster and the process seems to more easily pick up the joining points without the need for me to help with preview boxes. I'm not complaining by any means, but I'm wondering if there has been any work on StarAlignment to improve its mosaic construction capabilities and if so, what the future plans for it are! Thank you!

[Juan Conejero]

I have fixed a few bugs, one of them was affecting the application of distortion correction. Besides this, I have made also a few improvements which you are probably noticing; nothing really important, just fixing a few performance issues.

Briefly, future plans regarding image registration and mosaics are:

- A new distortion correction algorithm. This part of the StarAlignment tool will be completely redesigned and rewritten. The new algorithm will be much more robust and accurate.

- A redesigned StarAlignment interface. The current interface is unnecessarily complicated, with lots of parameters than are of little or no interest to normal users (they can be interesting for developers, but these use them through scripting).

- A new tool for astrometry-based mosaic generation. Actually, a mosaic should *always* be built under a controlled geometry. The only way to implement this correctly and efficiently for astronomical images is by means of astrometric solutions.

[Stephen Bogner]

This will be a welcome revision for those of use who like to use astrometric templates to produce mosaics.  I prefer to use a synthetic template image created by the CatalogStarGenerator script as a reference image in the StarAlignment process, as I find it is so much more efficient than repeating the image-by-image "Register/Union - Mosaic".  Several years ago I posted on this subject, and I would like to renew my suggestion to look at reworking the code to prevent this process from stripping out the 0 channel (red, typically for me).  Please see https://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=9346.msg59880#msg59880 for a detailed discussion of the issue.

Thanks.

Steve.