PixInsight 1.8.1 Ripley Released

[Juan Conejero]

Hi all,


I am glad to announce that a new version of PixInsight has been just released and is now available to all users: 1.8.1.1079 for FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.


How to Install the Release

This version is not available through the update system. You have to download the appropriate installation package(s) for your platform(s) from our Software Distribution system:

https://pixinsight.com/dist/

Simply uninstall your current version and install the new one:

FreeBSD and Linux: PixInsight installation packages are gzip-compressed tar archives (.tar.gz). To install one of these archives, extract its full contents on any directory, preferably on one located under your home directory. Then become root and run the installer program from a terminal. For complete information on the PixInsight Linux/UNIX installer program, see this forum post:

http://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=6336.0

Mac OS X: Uncompress the .zip archive to get the PixInsight.app application bundle. It can be executed from any location, but we recommend copying it to the standard /Applications folder, and optionally adding it to the Dock.

Windows: We provide standard Windows installation packages. To install one of these packages, launch the executable file and follow the instructions. Once installed, you'll have a new entry on your Start > All Programs menu (or equivalent item on Windows 8), namely PixInsight Platform, where you'll find an option to launch the PixInsight Core application. The installation also includes an uninstall utility.


Information on New Features

As usual, we'll be posting detailed information on the new features and tools included in this version on the Release Information forum board during the next days. This is a partial list with the most important features introduced by PixInsight 1.8.1:

* New MaskedStretch tool. This is an enhanced PCL/C++ implementation of the original algorithm by Carlos Sonnenstein and David Serrano, which has been available as a standard script since 2007. The new MaskedStretch tool is much faster, much more accurate, fully previewable, and much easier to use. This is a fundamental tool that is going to change the way most of us understand a crucial processing step in astrophotography: the initial nonlinear stretch. In a nutshell, MaskedStretch allows you to stretch your image protecting bright structures automatically and efficiently. Stretching images without saturation of bright stars and nebular structures is now a really easy task that can be incorporated into the normal processing workflow of deep-sky images. The results achieved with daylight images can also be spectacular, as we'll show with several examples. In the next days we'll post practical examples and a thorough description of this new tool in the Release Information board. The new implementation has been authored by Carlos Milovic and me.

* New behavior of multiple PixInsight Core application instances. When the Core application is launched and there are other instances running, the default bahavior is now to yield execution to the first running instance. Previously a new instance was created, which was causing some problems and was not the behavior that most users would expect. There are new command-line options to manage multiple running instances of the Core application through interprocess communication. We'll explain all this stuff.

* Integration of libjpeg version 9a. New option to use arithmetic coding along with the typical Huffman coding to write JPEG images.

* New SVG rendering engine based on the WebKit library. This replaces the old engine based on Qt, and provides us almost full coverage of the SVG 1.1 standard (basically everything except the animation module and embedded color profiles).

* New MosaicByCoordinates script by Andrés del Pozo, along with new versions of some more of his scripts. This is a fantastic piece of software that extends PixInsight's mosaic generation capabilities to non-overlapping mosaic frames, ultra-wide-field mosaics and mosaics with prescribed projections, based on astrometric solutions.

* Improved multithreading. As a side-effect of a recent bug fix, the thread creation and destruction tasks have been reimplemented and are now much faster than in previous versions. This yields a significant performance improvement for long batch processes, especially those involving creation of many threads on machines with many processor cores.


Bug Fixes

This version fixes most of the recently reported and confirmed bugs, as well as many undocumented bugs. These are the most important ones:

* Core/PCL: Thread objects were not destroyed during long batch processes (performance degradation - http://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=6484.0).

* Core: Deficient rendering of SVG graphics. (http://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=6534.0)

* PJSR: SurfaceSpline: Point weights were not working. (http://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=6540.0)

* PJSR: ProcessContainer was lacking methods to access mask properties of process instances. (http://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=6566.msg44544#msg44544)

* PJSR: Bitmap was lacking a property to get/set the bitmap's pixel format.

* PCL: ExternalProcess: stdout/stderr data were not being copied back to callers of ExternalProcess::StandardOutput() and ExternalProcess::StandardError(). (http://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=6496.0)

* PIDoc: Wrong style for ordered list items. (http://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=5689.0)

* ScriptEditor: C++ document icons were not rendered.

* Crop tool: Margin values were stored incorrectly in process icons and project files. (http://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=6623.0)

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Hope you like it!

[Alejandro Tombolini]

Juan / Carlos, thanks your the work . New Masked Stretch tool sound very interesting. I will download later to try it!

[Zocky]

Thanks for the new version.
It is up and running 

[Josh Lake]

Just working with Masked Stretch, it seems excellent. Can't wait for that documentation!

[Conor]

Is there any chance we can get a FreeBSD 10.0 build, now that -RELEASE has dropped? 

[pfile]

thumbs up!!

[NGC7789]

I see the OS X release does not mention 10.9. Is Mavericks supported on this release?

[Juan Conejero]

Is there any chance we can get a FreeBSD 10.0 build, now that -RELEASE has dropped?

Soon after a PC-BSD 10 release is available.

[Juan Conejero]

I see the OS X release does not mention 10.9. Is Mavericks supported on this release?

Yes it is. Thank you for pointing out this mistake. I have just updated the information given for 10.8/10.9 Mac OS X versions.

Tomorrow we'll release a special version of OS X 10.6/10.7.

[georg.viehoever]

Is it now possible for Windows to install two different versions side by side? Or is the recommendation still to uninstall before installing a new version?
Georg

[Juan Conejero]

Is it now possible for Windows to install two different versions side by side?

Unless you do some hacking, you can only have one version installed, that is, attached to the Start menu. You can have another version on a different directory and run it. However, both versions will share the same configuration file, so each time you run one of them the previous settings will be lost.

is the recommendation still to uninstall before installing a new version?

Yes, you should always uninstall the previous version. The installer program will erase the previous PixInsight folder on Program Files and on the Start menu, so in theory it should work without a previous uninstall. However, uninstalling costs nothing and guarantees a sanitized environment before starting to work with a new version of the platform.

[Alejandro Tombolini]

There are new command-line options to manage multiple running instances of the Core application through interprocess communication. We'll explain all this stuff.

Hi Juan, I usually work with more than one instance, so I am interested in knowing how to open it by command line in linux.

[Juan Conejero]

Hi Alejandro,

Use the -n option (or --new-instance if you prefer long variants):

   $ PixInsight -n

Since version 1.8.1 you can start a new instance at any application slot from 1 to 256. For example:

   $ PixInsight -n=3

will launch a new application on the third slot. If the specified slot is already running, you'll get an error message. If no slot number is specified, the new instance will occupy the first free slot.

[Alejandro Tombolini]

Hi Juan, That works fine, Thank you! 

Saludos. Alejandro.

[bitli]

Georg,
On windows 7 there is an ini file at
C:\Users\<youraccount>\AppData\Roaming\Pleiades\PixInsight64.ini
and this location is independent of the executable (it depends on the OS only), this the only reason you cannot have two independent PI on the same machine without some hacking, to my knowledge.

To be able to test if a script is still working on an old version of PI, I used to make version specific copies of the ini file and launch PI with a small script that was copying the proper version over the current one. This is not very good as it is easy to loose current changes to settings, however it was fine to test scripts, as you want a well defined environment anyhow. I did that only when I was also testing prerelease of PI, otherwise I do not bother with previous versions.

By the way you can look at the command line options of PixInsight by launching it with the option --help. There are a few of them useful especially to test scripts. However selecting the settings file is not (yet) one of them.

Finally you can always save your current settings file somewhere before doing the uninstall/install. So in case you need to re-install an older PI it is easy to restore the corresponding settings file.

-- bitli