Deep Sky Workflows

Do you have the same issue that I did? Despite doing things like splitting out stars to align separately, you always end up with star streaks. I finally figured out the simple, single step to do between star alignment and comet alignment that makes all the difference and produces streak-free comets for me every time (without having to split the lights). This video walks through the full end-to-end of processing comets in PixInsight.

  How to Process a Comet in PixInsight

Prefer article format? Read How do I stack a comet in PixInsight?.

Chapter Guide:

• 00:00:19 Review raw images
• 00:00:48 Step 1: Weighed Batch Preprocessing (WBPP)
• 00:01:50 Calibration settings
• 00:02:06 Exposure tolerance
• 00:02:29 Step 2: Comet alignment (wrong way)
• 00:03:39 Mark core of comet in first frame
• 00:04:01 Mark core of comet in last frame
• 00:04:36 Examine comet-aligned frame
• 00:04:54 Image integration
• 00:05:16 Streaks!
• 00:05:20 Step 2: Comet alignment (right way)
• 00:05:33 StarXTerminator (or StarNet++) to extract stars from integrated star-aligned image
• 00:06:06 Save stars to a file
• 00:06:24 Comet alignment…
• 00:06:31 Set the stars file as the “operand” (star-aligned) to subtract from each frame
• 00:06:52 Step 3: Post-processing
• 00:07:05 Examine comet-aligned frame
• 00:07:20 Image integration
• 00:08:16 PixelMath: combine the stars from the star-aligned integration with the comet from the comet-aligned integration
• 00:08:32 Crop out noise at edges (DC)
• 00:08:54 Automatic Background Extraction (ABE)
• 00:09:14 Dynamic Background Extraction (DBE)
• 00:09:51 BlurXTerminator
• 00:10:06 EZ Soft Stretch
• 00:10:38 StarXTerminator to process comet separate from stars
• 00:10:54 SCNR to remove green stars
• 00:11:11 Curves, masks, etc. to sharpen comet
• 00:12:02 PixelMath to recombine the stars

• 00:12:39 Final result

• Comet alignment
• StarXTerminator
• BlurXTerminator

See also: How to track a comet using N.I.N.A. software