I've been playing around and comparing processing approaches with darkflats vs. biases in various and sometimes non-traditional combinations for both flat and light frame processing. If, after calibrating lights with a darkflat processed Master Flat, and a "mormal" Master Dark, and then cosmetic correcting with the same Master Dark, StarAlignment works just fine - it takes about 1.5 minutes to register the 24 frames I'm using as test data (M13 Oiii). However, if I try to add a bias frame (either a "0" second Master Bias or a 0.1 sec master dark flat) to the Light frame calibration step, and then cosmetically correct, which all goes well, StarAlignment will load all images and align two of them in about 3-5 minutes, but then nothing happens for at least another 15 minutes. I have to pause/abort the process, which only results in PI becoming "unresponsive", and then I have to force a PI termination to get out. This only happens when I use a dark flat-subtracted Master Flat, a non-calibrated Master Dark and either a "normal" Master Bias or a 0.1sec dark-flats (as a bia frame) during light frame calibration.
The PC is a 12 core AMD running at 4.2mHz, 32Gb ram and a 1Tb NVME drive. I get a benchmark of about 19,500. When the above idleness is occurring the CPU is at 8-15% and the machine is using about 7 GB of RAM. I've tried using a different SSD for all data and processed files in case there is a problem with my NVME, but that resulted in no difference. I also uninstalled and reinstalled PI +/- all updates since Feb. with no effect.
When testing a slightly different processing approach, but still involving a bias or darkflat at two steps, Integration (after successfully registering the frames) would fail on the first frame and report the reference image (regardless of what frame I used as reference) as something like "very low signal or empty file?". All image files showed an image with a STF, but I assumed they way I tried adding the bias frame to to the processing path removed too much signal? In any case, I suspect the problem here is similar -somehow there is too little signal remaining in the frame after my experimental processing approaches for SA to find stars. That's all fine, but the "bug" to me is that after 15 minutes hung up on registering a single frame, I would think StarAlignment would time out. The last entry in the processing console is reporting that it is/was saving the drizzle file from the second registered frame. It does not indicate that a third frame was loaded. I've had plenty of data sets where SA could not find a star match, but that never slowed down the overall process - it just reports the failure of that particular frame and moves on. With the processor at 15% on this current set it seems like SA is just giving up or bewildered and not doing anything.
The PC is a 12 core AMD running at 4.2mHz, 32Gb ram and a 1Tb NVME drive. I get a benchmark of about 19,500. When the above idleness is occurring the CPU is at 8-15% and the machine is using about 7 GB of RAM. I've tried using a different SSD for all data and processed files in case there is a problem with my NVME, but that resulted in no difference. I also uninstalled and reinstalled PI +/- all updates since Feb. with no effect.
When testing a slightly different processing approach, but still involving a bias or darkflat at two steps, Integration (after successfully registering the frames) would fail on the first frame and report the reference image (regardless of what frame I used as reference) as something like "very low signal or empty file?". All image files showed an image with a STF, but I assumed they way I tried adding the bias frame to to the processing path removed too much signal? In any case, I suspect the problem here is similar -somehow there is too little signal remaining in the frame after my experimental processing approaches for SA to find stars. That's all fine, but the "bug" to me is that after 15 minutes hung up on registering a single frame, I would think StarAlignment would time out. The last entry in the processing console is reporting that it is/was saving the drizzle file from the second registered frame. It does not indicate that a third frame was loaded. I've had plenty of data sets where SA could not find a star match, but that never slowed down the overall process - it just reports the failure of that particular frame and moves on. With the processor at 15% on this current set it seems like SA is just giving up or bewildered and not doing anything.
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