possible error in Star Alignement Mosaic mode - pixinsight 1.6

[h0ughy]

I was trying to demonstrate how pixinsight works to a fellow astrophotographer – they graciously allowed me to use their data to make a mosaic image from the individual panels.

There were 4 tiff panels used (total image time over 20 hours) and the resultant file was pretty large.  I was able to stich together 3 panels with no problems – it was when I was adding the 3 panel stitch to the final panel that the error happened – out of memory.

It was done on a win XPpro machine wit h2.5 meg ram – so I then tried it on a quad core vista 32bitt system and got the same problem – that system had 4 gig memory.

I then tried another tact and got the image done by joining two panels together – then joining those two results together and I was able to get the same image.  My question is they are the same files – the same file size – why did I get an error doing it the first method?

[h0ughy]

the errors are here

[Nocturnal]

Time to put 64b windows on that 4G machine. Right now that memory is going to waste

[h0ughy]

Time to put 64b windows on that 4G machine. Right now that memory is going to waste

love to do that Sander but some software that is used wil not work under a 64 bit environment.  id love a i7 with 16 gig memory and two 1gig vid cards with dual 24" screens  maybe next year

but the point in question is that doing it one way doesnt work and still using the same files utilising another stacking method does work?

[Nocturnal]

I run everything on a Vista x64 box. Stuff that doesn't run (haven't found it yet) is put on the scrap heap or run on older XP machines I still have.

With a 32b machine you're going to be limited in what you can do. Try to close all unnecessary processes right after a fresh reboot before starting PI to give it the best possible chance to grab a large chunk of memory. Perhaps Juan can provide more assistance to figure out why things work one way and not another. It seems clear one way is more efficient.

Consider turning that 4 core machine into a dual boot box and install Linux on your other partition so you can at least run PI in 64b mode. Perhaps it's possible to do this wtih a VirtualBox VM but I'm not sure how efficient that is and if the 32b host OS is a limitation.

[Niall Saunders]

I have to agree with Sander,

64-bit is definitely the way forward.

The only software that I have found that does NOT run in Windows Vista-64 was Google Desktop - and that was over a year ago, and I have never been back to see if they have finally rewritten it to work in 64-bit (highly likely now that Win7 is here to stay).

Most '32-bit' software will run in the '32-bit mode' provided by Windows 64-bit OS's, the biggest problem will be applications requiring the use of low-level drivers in order to be able to interface with the outside world. If those drivers were written such that they will ONLY work in a 32-bit OS, then you will need to double-check that they can still work in a 64-bit world, and may need to consider Win7 64-bit as a solution.

Or, as Sander suggests, deem that hardware to be 'beyond its sell-by date', and consider upgrading, or only using it on an 'old' 32-bit platform.

Multiple big images on PI require BIG memory - and that means 64-bit addressing.

Cheers,

[h0ughy]

OK OKOK  -  i got the message.

I rebuilt a dual core lappy i have with win7 64bit (home premium) .  loaded everything up and i had to apply a few patch updates to stop a blue screen of death - now it all works fine.  here is a sample of the "finished" image this i did with the data.  I can see a lot of possibilities but he did his processing in Images Plus and his RAW files are in FITS format - but they load up in 3 panels?  not sure whats going on there.  Will work out why that is happening and reprocess it from scratch.

[Nocturnal]

Awesome image!

The images plus FITS behavior was discussed yesterday/today in this forum. A search should show you the thread.

[h0ughy]

Thanks - i did find that after i did this.

As i said the data is not mine - i just worked on putting the panels together - there is over 20 hours of imaging in the mosaic .  The gentleman that took the images has won severeal David Malin Award.  I was very lucky he agreed for me to have a hack at it

[RobF2]

This is the first time in a long while I've stubbornly refused to update (from XP32 currently).  I love having PC and 2 laptops all running the same OS.  This is a wake up call though - can only be Luddite for so long!

Must check out mosaic mode too - interesting thread

[Nocturnal]

I was an XP32 holdout for a long time and still most of my computers run that old dog of an OS. Last year I built a new computer specifically for astro processing and stuck Vista x64 on it. I've been very impressed. Despite its bad rap I've had generally good experiences. I haven't yet found software that doesn't work, even VB5 apps like Elbrus can be made to run. Since this computer doesn't deal with imaging itself I'm not worried about drivers. I have the Win7 upgrade disk but haven't tried yet.