Is StarAlignment Opensource?

[Dvelledge]

Real Time Stacking:

I'm using PCL to do high quality real time stacking module.  The program is mainly significantly reworking the Image Integration module to accept a single image to start, and then stack additional images on top of the image, while maintaining the statistical data on each pixel stack to allow of additional images to be added.  basically instead of processing pixel stack by pixel stack, doing image by image.

Part of this is a new interface to a small set of processes that we will use including Callibration, StarAlignment, the reworked realtime Image Intergration, and a few others, like color calibration, historgram transformation, etc.  The idea is to be able to process the images as they come off the telescope as we have seen in other products.

The one component that seems to be missing in the PCL library is star alignment.  I could get by without this but wondering if this is opensource.  If the code is available in opersource that is great, if not, can I use the compiled DLL without the pix-insight front in or is that no allow according to the license. 

Don

[Juan Conejero]

Hi Don,

Interesting project. I assume this is a PixInsight module. Can you please elaborate a bit more about this? Will this tool (or toolset) be publicly available?

StarAlignment has not been released as an open-source product (for several strategic reasons, but recently because we are working on a completely new distortion modeling algorithm, which I don't want to publicize for now). However, if you are writing a public module, and especially if you are going to release it as an open-source product, we can assist you by sharing code from SA.

As you probably know we are also working on an integration of the INDIGO platform with PixInsight. A real-time integration tool would work nicely with the new image acquisition capabilities that we'll implement.

[Dvelledge]

I will release the module as a public module.  The module will conform to the Pixinsight class library standards.  It will be a few of us working on this but the module will have to maintain a lot of state information about the stack and be able to register, calibrate, and perform a few other functions as new images pop out of the telescope.  It is to support my personal observatory initially and focused on the ability to create a great user experience for visitors who can be in a theater room  and view the continually enhancing images as we get more data  coming out of my CDK700.  There is no software that does this well today, non are designed to give people a great experience perform high quality processing on the images . the goal is to have the guest to  be able to see the image developing on the screen as a pure 4k video stream while we can manage the telescope and adjust the processing through a different interface keeping that distraction hidden from the audience.   It's good to know that we can have some access to the star alignment logic if we need it, We might be able to just call the dll from pixsight but we are still working out the design and figuring out the components we need. 

Don

[Dvelledge]

Hello Juan,

I don't think we need to use the staralignment code.  After doing some research my engineer feels we need a much less sophisticated capability for our star alignment. Because we are dealing with only real time processing, we will not have mosaics or different optical systems and many other capabilities that your system has.  We need find candidate matching stars and then OpenCV can be used for the homography and Ransac routines.  So for now we are good but will keep you informed as we move foreword.

Don