Astrophotography: Processing Galaxies in PixInsight

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.