PixInsight - Comet Processing

 Option a) Starless Image Integration on Comets using StarNetV2

updated: 2023-02-12


Purpose

Aligning all images on a comet and removing (most of) the stars

Image registration is the process of aligning two or more images of the same scene by superimposition. This requires the estimation of optimal geometric transformations to align the images with respect to a common reference. Image registration is critical to any processing and analysis task that relies on combining data from sets of images. Some examples include image integration, multi-channel image fusion, joint information retrieval, change detection, and image mosaicing. These tasks have applications in astronomy, medical imaging, remote sensing, cartography, real-time target recognition, and computer vision, to name a few.

Alternative

As an alternative to the editing steps described here, the AI tool StarXTerminator, which is available as a PixInsight plugin for a fee, can also be used.

Activation

Process 🡺 All Processes 🡺 Image Integration

Input

Batch of comet aligned frames

Output

Integrated Master Frame

Previous Step

Next Step

Tutorial(s)



Step

Description

Action

1

Open the Image StarNetV2 Tool

Process 🡺 All Processes 🡺 StarNetV2


In case StarNetV2 is not installed on your computer then follow these steps for installation:

see 


2

Open an Image Container

3

Add all comet aligned frames

4

Drag the blue little triangle to your workspace

and close the image container main window

5

Activate the StarNet Process

Drag little blue triangle on the StarNetV2 onto the image container icon on your workspace.


Warning: for a set of about 100 frames the process can take up to several hours depending on your hardware!

6

Do an Image Integration of the resulting StarNet frames

using the parameters on the right

7

Result

This is an integrated image with more or less all stars erased from the background but with some strange artifacts Used only 14 of 85 total frames due to the very slow processing speed):

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