PixInsight Intensive Workshop
By Vicent Peris
11 – 17 March 2015, Katonah, New York, USA
This workshop aims at giving a comprehensive operational/technical understanding of Pixinsight to a small group of participants (5–10) over the course of 7 concentrated working days.
Participants will bring all their own unprocessed data sets which will be processed during the week. The structure of the seminar will allow participants an in-depth view of Pixinsight, with the goal of having a total immersion in the process of the image creation.
Workshop language will be English.
Workshop Dates and Venue
The workshop will take place in a mid-century modern, private home in Katonah, near New York city. We will all sit around a dining table and immerse ourselves in processing data.
The workshop will start on Wednesday, March 11th, and will run through Tuesday, March 17th. We suggest arriving in the area on Tuesday, March 10th, and departing on Thursday, March 18th.
Number of Participants
The aim of this workshop is to have a close encounter with the PixInsight platform and the teacher, so a maximum of 10 participants will be allowed for the full week. Each participant should bring his/her laptop and portable drive to share the data to be processed.
Rates and Registration
With a total duration of 45 hours, the registration price is 800 Euros. Click the button below to register through PayPal.
Lodging Options
You need to make your own boarding/meals arrangements. We suggest staying at Holiday Inn in Mt. Kisco:
Holiday Inn
1 Holiday Inn Drive
Mount Kisco, New York 10549
(914) 241-2600
This hotel is about a 10-minute drive to the property where the workshop will be held. We are currently trying to get a special room prices for the hotel—we will confirm this shortly. There are plenty of restaurants in the Katonah/Mt. Kisco area.
Please contact Al Vinjamur (al_v(at)mindspring(dot)com) for further details.
Workshop Sponsors
Workshop Methodology
People should expect a general feature / in-depth tour of Pixinsight. The workshop is divided in common and individual processing sessions. The common sessions will be run with entire processing examples. Therefore, starting from completely raw data sets, each participant will learn to assemble / generate unprocessed data into respective master files while gaining an understanding of how to pre-process the raw data for optimal signal to noise levels.
The post-processing will be focused on singular techniques that will cover the main imaging needs of the participants. Each example will be processed from start to finish with everyone in the class, processing the same image set at the same time. This will allow all participants to learn the details of each step of the workflow, while appreciating that the workflow will vary depending on the quality and characteristics of the data.
The aim of the workshop is to get everybody in the class up to speed using Pixinsight. The small size of the class will ensure that the class moves together at a steady pace, learning by doing.
The first day will be dedicated to understand the general workflow in the PixInsight platform and to inspect the available data sets and their special characteristics. From the second to the sixth day we'll process the selected data sets. The last day will be reserved to review all the different workflows developed during the week and to do a detailed critique of individual choices made by each student in the processing of the images.
Workshop Documentation
Each attendee will be provided with a workshop book. This book will have all the needed workflow charts, basic processing examples and a detailed article for each start to finish example.
Workflow Charts
Each participant will have a full set of PixInsight workflow charts describing the techniques reviewed during the weekend. Covering the main concepts in a visual style, these charts will help you to carry out your own work at home. The workflow charts will cover also the start to finish examples so you won't be lost in these longer cases.
A pendrive with all the images, projects and process icons will be also provided to all the participants.
Start-to-Finish Examples
In this workshop we'll review the following examples:
Click on the images for full-size versions.
HDR / LRGB - Messier 42
Data provided by Al Vinjamur - www.alvinjamur.com
This example will cover mainly these topics:
- Multiple exposure set management with the BatchPreprocessing script.
- HDR image assembling with HDRComposition.
- LRGB Combination.
- Dynamic range compression.
Narrowband palettes - Rosette Nebula
Data provided by Al Vinjamur - www.alvinjamur.com
This example will cover mainly these topics:
- Hubble's and alternative palettes.
- PixelMath.
- Star color correction.
HDR / HaLRGB - Messier 31
Data provided by Adrien Richardson.
This example will cover mainly these topics:
- Multiple exposure set management in BPP.
- HDR image assembling with HDRComposition. LRGB with high dynamic range L component and low dynamic range RGB components.
- H-alpha enhancement with linear images.
- Denoising and masking techniques.
Sample Images Processed by Students of Previous Intensive Workshops
Click on the images for full-size versions.
Messier 17 (SHO) - Colin Cooper
Messier 51 (HaRGB) - HST data / Tyler Ferrari
Horsehead nebula and Messier 78 - Colin Cooper
NGC 6992 - Edward Popovitch
About Vicent Peris
With more than a 15-year career as an astrophotographer, Vicent Peris (Valencia, Spain, 1980) has been working for the last 7 years at the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Valencia (OAUV). He is now leading the world-renowned astrophotographic programs at Calar Alto Observatory (CAHA) with the 3.5 meter and 1.23 meter Zeiss telescopes, the latter in collaboration with the Documentary School of Astrophotography (DSA), applying innovative image processing techniques and software tools. This is the first astrophotography project in the world with access to the observational time of professional telescopes.
You can see some of the published images of the Calar Alto project on the Gallery section of PixInsight's website, as well as some of Vicent's articles about his image processing techniques on the Processing Examples section.
His works have been published and awarded by some of the most reputed publications worldwide, such as APOD, Scientific American, National Geographic, Bad Astronomy Blog, and Sterne und Weltraum.
Vicent is also the official astrophotographer of the ALHAMBRA Survey, a deep cosmological survey conducted by an international scientific collaboration, acquired from Calar Alto Observatory using the 3.5 meter Zeiss telescope. This survey is the first in the world to use a new instrumental technique known as photometric redshifts, in which low-resolution spectra for each object in an image are obtained by using a large, 23 narrow-filter set covering the 3500 – 9500 angstrom light band. You can see some image samples at Vicent's website.
Vicent has also successful experience in forensics and is currently working as an image processing specialist for the Spanish National Police department since two years.
For more information about Vicent's works, please download his portfolio.