I Love PixInsight!

[Rob Friefeld]

I'm a beginner with less than 10 images to my portfolio. When I got started with CCD astronomy, I understood the learning curve would be steep.  The truth is, I like a steep learning curve. Image acquisition is OK (I don't mind sitting out under the stars), but what I really look forward to is processing what I got with PixInsight. This is because the results astound me, there seems to be a solution to every problem, and because I keep getting better and better.

My most recent image was of the M81/M82 pair. For the first time, I imaged with a significant moon, I allowed my mount to do a meridian flip, I added Ha to LRGB, and I tried binning the color 2x2. This made for a lot of tedious preparation: flipping, cropping, bad background gradient, etc. But it went well. Process Containers! Yes! Saved Processes! Yes! Fantastic support discussions on the Forum! Yes!

So I just wanted to say thank you to the team. I'm sure the time is coming when every astrophotographer will use PixInsight.

[Josh Lake]

Welcome, Rob! That same magic feeling that you're having was experienced by most or all of us, I think. For me, it was a set of M31 data that I thought was unrecoverable. I was using a number of other processing programs, but I just wasn't getting the results I expected. My scope and camera combo were capable of so much more, but the 'industry standard' image program steps seemed so arbitrary and hacky. Enter PixInsight, with its powerful tools and logical approach to each image. The M31 gradients disappeared with careful use of DBE, and I ended up with my best image ever at the time....all from a data set that I thought was toast! It was Day 2 of my trial, and I immediately purchased.

So welcome to the best years of your processing life, it only gets better as you learn more and pull beautiful images out of your raw data.

[jerryyyyy]

Welcome aboard.  I am still a novice but I like the deep set of options with this software.  If you like a steep learning curve, check out the issues around noise removal....