PixInsight in the US News

[MikeWiles]

NBC News has a story today on the Hubble's hidden treasures image processing contest, which can be seen here:  http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/08/23/13440756-discover-hubbles-hidden-treasures?lite

The story contains a link to a YouTube video showing a time lapse video of the image processing on the winning image.  PixInsight figures very heavily into that timelapse video and it's nice to see the software getting a little exposure in a news story like this.  Hopefully this will mean a huge spike in license sales. 

Mike

[chris_todd]

Wow, that winning image is great, and the time lapse was even cooler!  According to the story, the winner is Josh Lake.  May we safely assume that is user jlake from this forum?  If so, Congrats, Josh!  Awesome work.

[Josh Lake]

Yep, that's me, thanks! 

I absolutely give credit to PixInsight and its powerful tools for the success of the image. PixelMath in particular was the key to getting the combination that the judges found compelling.

I think it's clear from the video just how big a role PI played and how minor my tweaking in Photoshop needed to be!

I'm hoping that this win will lead to some conference presentations, and I'll certainly be promoting PI as the best way to process in those.

[Harry page]

Hi

Excellent stuff well done indeed  8)

Harry

[pfile]

that is very nice and... sigur ros!

i submitted a reprocess of m51 to the flickr group - not sure why, really, since it was ineligible for the contest. i had actually processed the image long before the contest. over the last couple of days i've seen 50-60 hits on that image and i could not figure out why. i guess people must be looking at the flickr group due to the publicity.

[Alejandro Tombolini]

Beautifull image Josh. Congrats!

Regards, Alejandro.

[Josh Lake]

Thanks, all! Yes, I thought the frenetic pace of the Sigur Ros song was perfect for a sped up video... now that the video is getting so many more hits, I hope they don't mind. I tried to attribute them clearly.

I think it's the video that helped push the consideration, honestly. I randomly selected this field to do a screencast and wasn't sure how it'd come out. It's honestly not my favorite one of the group that I processed! But I think the judges appreciated seeing the creation of a synthetic green frame in PixelMath from the video.

Anyway, thanks for the support. Without Harry's intro videos, Juan's explanations on the forum (and tireless work on PI, of course), and Vicent's workflow logic, it wouldn't have been possible. I've learned so much from these forum pages and still have a long way to go.

[Yanick B]

Hi guys,
The youtube link link was detaged from the article. Would one of you still have it by any chance? I have searched the web and youtube without success.
Thanks,
Yanick

[NGC7789]

This is it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcdsI-5viqs

and it is amazing. Now we just need the slow version to use as a tutorial!

[Phil Leigh]

Interesting - great work and of course all of the PS steps can be done in Pi...

[Josh Lake]

This is it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcdsI-5viqs

and it is amazing. Now we just need the slow version to use as a tutorial!

Ask and you shall receive!

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/yj2ui4aap7zoekx/xxKUSXCY07

However, I'd note that there are far better tutorials out there for all of the different steps. Old Wexi's tutorials, especially on PixelMath, are amazing.

The story behind both the image and the video is funny. I was at the NEAIC imaging conference and was a bit bored by the speaker -- I won't mention who it was. I downloaded the Hubble data from the Legacy Archive and sat there processing it in PI. On a lark, I turned on the screen recording, never thinking that this would be a great image, much less the winning image. I like how this image came out, but I was doing a fair amount of 'playing' with it.

The rest is history, and I'm still rather taken aback that it happened!