Astrophotography: Processing Galaxies with PixInsight

Get over the hurdle of PixInsight’s complexity and learning curve, and apply it to make your galactic astro-images awesome.

PixInsight is a powerful tool, but with a steep learning curve. If you’re ready to take your astrophotography to the next level, this course will de-mystify PixInsight and unleash its potential for you. Even if you’re an experienced PixInsight user, I think you’ll find some tips, tricks, and scripts you may not have encountered before.

We’ll walk through the processing of the galaxy M61, a distant, challenging target that includes an image of a recent supernova! As we go, we’ll cover:

• Installing my PixInsight process icons and third-party scripts to simplify things
• Identifying and discarding bad sub-frames with the Blink process
• Calibrating your frames across multiple nights using the WeightedBatchPreprocessing script
• Weighted stacking with WeightedBatchPreprocessing
• Linear noise reduction with MURE Denoise
• Cropping your integrated images
• Creating luminance, range, and star masks
• Sharpening your image with deconvolution
• Background extraction
• Color combination, luminance integration, and photometric color correction
• Stretching into non-linear space while preserving star colors
• Nonlinear noise reduction with TGVD Denoise
• Aesthetic tweaking with RGB and saturation curves
• Shrinking and re-shaping stars with MorphologicalTransform
• Annotating your images
• Final tweaks in Photoshop

This walkthrough uses monochrome data collected over 3 nights using luminance, red, green, and blue color filters. But many of these techniques will be the same if you’re using a color camera as well.

Don’t let PixInsight’s unusual user interface and complexity scare you off – it’s worth learning, and can really take your images to the next level.

Course Instructor

Frank Kane Author

Frank is an avid amateur astrophotographer, and a board member of the Central Florida Astronomical Society (cfas.org). For years he has refined his skills in imaging deep sky objects and the planets.