Is there a user manual?

[mikey2000]

Hi,

I’m very new to PixInsight and was wondering if there is any official offline documentation?    I’m hoping for a pdf or similar with a quick start guide, some basic processing introductions and then a reference for all the built in processes and scripts.

I’ve stumbled across many many online videos and guides but it’s a bit overwhelming when you don’t even know what you need to know.   I have a modest amount of experience with DSS and Startools but this isn’t helping much with PixInsight.

With so much community-generated reference material, it’s hard to know which bits are good, ok or even downright wrong.

So if there is an official reference, I’d love to find it!   Or is there a “best place to go” reference?   I prefer written/screenshotted material to YouTube guides - I’m frequently offline.


Any advice greatly appreciated!  (Only 44 days until my trial expires...)

[pfile]

no user guide per se. i know that jkmorse (a user here) has a crib sheet that he's written and will send to you if you send him a PM.

the 'gold standard' reference for PI is Warren Keller's book. also Chris Woodhouse's 2nd edition book covers Pixinsight quite a bit.

rob

[Geoff]

Also highly recommended is http://www.harrysastroshed.com/Pixinsighthome.html

[mikey2000]

Thanks again Geoff and pfile.   It's good to know these are recommended links, even now.  I found a lot of the references mentioned in the sticky post were broken or possible referring to old versions.   

I also found lightvortexastronomy.com with lots of rather interesting looking written tutorials.   Have you seen these before? Are they accurate/useful? My first impression is "yes", but as I previously mentioned, I'm in a Rumsfeldian position of having many Unknown Uknowns :-)

[derrickf]

You might also take a look at the collection of excellent information here: http://www.pixinsight.com.ar/en/

Derrick

[wimvb]

Thanks again Geoff and pfile.   It's good to know these are recommended links, even now.  I found a lot of the references mentioned in the sticky post were broken or possible referring to old versions.   

I also found lightvortexastronomy.com with lots of rather interesting looking written tutorials.   Have you seen these before? Are they accurate/useful? My first impression is "yes", but as I previously mentioned, I'm in a Rumsfeldian position of having many Unknown Uknowns :-)

Kayron Merciecas (lightvortexastronomy) tutorials are highly recommended. As an intro, there are also a few good youtube videos by Richard Bloch. Just search that name on youtube.

[mikey2000]

Hi Wim!  Nice to see you here (as well as on SGL!)  Thanks - I'm going through the Light Vortex tutorials right now.  It's heavy going - a long step from Startools...

[Josh Lake]

LightVortex is awesome, but I think it might be worth waiting until you have a couple of good processing runs under your belt.

I found the official PixInsight youtube channel videos on a full processing run to be very helpful: https://youtu.be/zqhLKIjGMXA?t=62

I second the recommendation of Harry's Astroshed, he's great. The website can be a little tricky to navigate, but his videos started it all for me.

Back in the day, I volunteered to take people's actual data sets and process them as a screencast to help them see the potential in their data. I'm a teacher, so it's good practice! Here's one I did for a guy on Reddit (who is now an outstanding processor himself): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNURR_wf7ro

I can offer to do the same for you if you'd like -- if you have some master frames, we could use Dropbox or whatever to share and I could make a screencast of the processing steps I'd take...

Welcome to the other side from Startools -- I think you'll like it a lot better in the long run!

[pproulx]

There are a bunch of great free and paid resources.  Warren's book is probably the closest thing to a user manual right now.
http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319256801
https://www.amazon.com/Inside-PixInsight-Patrick-Practical-Astronomy-ebook/dp/B01LW9KNRX

We also have some great tutorials on our WEB site - There's a free Primer there along with some paid but many free tutorials.

www.ip4ap.com

Harry was motioned in an earlier post, his site and many others are listed on our resource page.

Pete