New user, Help!!

[speach]

As I said I'm new to PI also astrophotography. What the problem at the moment, is that when ever I go to Star alignment I get this error message only 1, to, 5 stars found need six for alignment. This will happen even if there are a lot of stars in the image and also they are bright. What's going on and more importantly how do I get round it?

[pfile]

the shape of the stars could be bad enough that SA can't get a lock on them without some tweaking of parameters.

one of the dropdowns in the star alignment process is "Star Detection". if you open that, it may help to move the sensitivity slider to the left (larger negative numbers) or move peak response to the right (toward 1). StarAlignment also has a mode called "detected stars" where all it will do is copy the image you apply it to, but mark all the points where it thought there was a star. you can SA in this mode while tweaking those parameters to make sure that SA is finding what really are stars in your image.

also note that if you have a preview defined on your reference or target image, by default SA will restrict itself to those previews. you can turn that off in the "star matching" drop-down.

rob

[speach]

Thanks Rob

[jkmorse]

Speach,

This sounds like it might be a format issue that people have run into in the past.  If Rob's suggestion doesn't work, try the following, from a prior post:

You may be running into some FITS incompatibility issues.  I did a lot of research recently on FITS incompatibilities and this issue has been addressed time and again by PI.  Here is the results of my research into old posts on the subject:

Fixing FITS Incompatibilities
If you experience these types of incompatibilities, try the following until you hit on a solution:

First
•   Open the Format Explorer (access under “View > Explorer Windows”)
•   Double click on “FITS”
•   Make sure the top two boxes are checked
       o   “Write scaling keywords . . .”
       o   “Signed Integer images . . .”

Second
•   Where possible, particularly in the Image Calibration tool for Lights, but also with ImageIntegration when creating Master Darks and Master Bias, add the following to the “input hints” line under “Format Hints”:
       o   lower-range 0 upper-range 65535

Third
•   If the above does not work, insert the following in the “input hints” line:
       o   Signed-is-physical

Stop using input hints AFTER you have successfully saved an image after applying a PI tool; i.e, do not use input hints in ImageIntegration after successfully calibrating Light images in PI with the ImageCalibration tool (after first PI application, images are saved in proper PI format (0,1) and no longer need input hints)

For an excellent explanation of what is happening to cause this problem, check out the following threads from Juan Conejero:

http://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=3118.msg21348
http://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=3474,msg23973
http://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=3800.msg26086

Also, if you as a starter drinking from a fire hose, I have put together ta Cribsheet that I share with a number of other PixInsight users that I update regularly.  If you are interested in a copy, just drop me a line at jkmorse57@gmail.com and I will happy to send the latest version to you.

Hope that helps,

Jim

[cdesselles]

FITS incompatibilities...  I assume the new XISF format will make this issue a thing of the past.  At least I hope so.

[jkmorse]

As one who has suffered FITS problems many times in the past, I can only say amen to the suggestion that .xisf may make that a thing of the past.  I switch over immediately now.

Best,

Jim

[Don]

As I said I'm new to PI also astrophotography. What the problem at the moment, is that when ever I go to Star alignment I get this error message only 1, to, 5 stars found need six for alignment. This will happen even if there are a lot of stars in the image and also they are bright. What's going on and more importantly how do I get round it?

You may also get this error is the data is one-shot color (e.g., DSLR data) and you haven't debayered the calibrated files before running StarAlignment.

Don