Elevate Your Seestar Mosaic To The Next Level | Full Manual Stacking Tutorial
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Great video full of really useful information. You obviously have such great in depth understanding of the processes. Well done
SUPERB HELPFUL - Thank you SO MUCH!! Just one question: Do you use livestacking on your Seestars? Or would you recommend continuous shooting?! And would the later work with mosaic mode???
I believe continuous shooting is not an option when using framing and/or 4K modes
starting at 9:02 all the way though the debayering section was so fascinating (i'm on my first week with the s30 as my very first telescope)
I have nearly 2000 10 second exposures from 2 different seestars (M 42). I followed your Tutorial step by step, but PI failed at 470 of those pictures when registering them... Is there any other way to process that pictures? I try to run ImageSolver now on the pictures. Side node: the Seestars where both in EQ-Mode. And Im fairly new to astrophotography and Pixinsight, so maybe I've done something completly wrong... Thanks for the Video!
Will WBPP just work instead of breaking down the process as you did ?
it will work but will likely fail to register a large number of the frames
@the_space_koalagotcha. Thanks for info
Great video...i tried everything in your tutorial but i still ended up with not having enough feathering in my picture. Basically a checker board of different nights of exposures. Any recommendations i can make to change that? I have 1800 exposures.
not sure what you mean about feathering? could it be that you had different gradients throughout the different nights? I think that would make it more difficult for the system to handle
@the_space_koalayes exactly i had different gradients from different nights. I live in bortle 9 skies which doesn't help. But i was wondering if there was a way in pixinsight that i could blend them in together instead of having these gradients? I am also using the seestar s30. Thank you for responding!
@the_space_koala I'm seeing the same thing as jojo--everywhere the subs overlap in the mosaic. Definitely much stronger if I use multiple nights shot in bortle 5, but I can see the checker board pattern for shots taken in a single night (1180 images). Although pixinsight really highlights the ugliness in the low_rejection image generated from integration (pix tries to remove it), the pattern is still there in the final integrated image. Doing a gradient correction doesn't get rid of it either after integration either as i suspect it doesn't like the non-uniformity. I have tried adjusting the pedestal during cc and debayering and have also tried process and image containers in the workflow to crop the edges and do a quick/dirty gradient removal using graxpert on each debayered image before registration and integration. This seems to help some but the pattern still remains. Any other suggestions would be helpful to try. Thanks!
Thanks a lot for your very great video. Quite technical but the step by step process is clear.
Can't we do this using WBPP by providing the reference image?
you can but the risk is that more frames will not be registered as you have less control over the registration parameters
Great video, very helpful and informative!
thank you
Brilliant video. I didn't think this was possible. Very informative.
I am Bryant, hello
Hello, thanks for the video! It's a great guide, im working on stacking my first mosaic. Should the reference image should also be debayered before alignment, like you show with the subs?
the reference image should already be debayered when you download it, nothing for you to do
Hey there! Was wondering if there was a way/edit to the steps to make it so you can processes multi mosaic multi night kind of deal? I'm trying to stitch together a bunch of mosaics to make a larger mosaic of m31. Say, 10x the max mosaic size. So far I have about 20k subs that I need to get stacked. Seems like I need to stack each night and then stack all those files? What reference image would I use, just the center mosaic that the Seestar produced of m31? Basically, how can I get it to stitch subs that are wider than the reference image?
If i were you I would first stitch the existing masters together manually. To do this, among others you can do StarAlignment in mosaic mode always stitching 2 together. It should not take super long and you will have your dummy "master" which will look horrible in terms of gradients, but it doesn't matter as it will give you a new reference. After that you can follow this tutorial utilizing your new master as the reference. hope this makes sense
@the_space_koalastitch the masters from the Seestar itself together? If that’s needed, I deleted those, whoops! I do have a huge master mosaic I was able to make with siril. It has some ugly black spots and stuff though and it didn’t stitch it together perfectly. Every time I try using that reference image, with all the debayered subs, it fails. But when i use the reference image from the night that I took the mosaic (from the Seestar, as you did), it can complete. Really appreciate all your vids, been watching a year now at least.
@the_space_koala another approach is to render a synthetic star field to use as the alignment reference. It can be created as large as you want.
Thank you for the great video! I've followed this process a few times (without local normalization) and I keep getting banding (gradients) in the final result. Whats the best way to fix that in Pixinsight? I get the banding even if I use the Blink process to weed out subframes with obvious light polution (or interference from passing clouds).
I wouldn’t expect light pollution would cause banding. I would expect it to show up as a mostly uniform cast over your image! Not sure what may cause the banding in your case!
Hi Paul, I also have the same problem. I searched online, forums, etc., but no solution for now. Did you find any fix?
@AdrianoAlfaro I *think* the banding is caused by aggressive settings on the ImageIntegration screen. I reverted to default settings there and the banding went away… but I haven’t isolated exactly which settings on that screen are the problem. I noticed some banding in Luca’s video as well.
@paulwelka8288 I'm still investigating, but I want to point a few things. Fist of all I'm stacking and Andromeda mosaic, where the core is very bright. After inspecting the Seestar fits, there's an evident banding also in the original stacks (I have about 10 3hours stacks and all have the problem). So the problem is the exposure, in the center is lower and on the edges is higher. If I stack in Siril I got the same problem, but it seems that it fix with feathering option. I have a stacking current going on in Siril, so I'll know the results later today and let you know. Unfortunately there's no feather option in PixInsight ImageIntegration. Moral of the story, the big problem lies in the single exposures that are not consistent.
@paulwelka8288 so, the Siril stack with feather to 100px is without the banding (almost), but the quality of the details is lower. I ended up using the PixInsight stack for the core/galaxy and the Siril stack for the sky. The result is good, but it's more work of course.
Thank you for your time and effort. Most appreciated. May I ask a question? When checking the data from mosaic mode, I found that they are stored under a 'data' file under which I could not find any extension names of the individual files no matter how I tried to switch window explorer to show hidden files and file extension. I just could not find the .fit files. Unlike the non-mosaic mode where you can easily find the .fit and .jpg files under the sub folder. Thank you for any advice.
they should work exactly the same way! Any chance you turned off the saving of each individual frame and that's why you don't find them? In any case if you see the files they're still fits (unless you are looking at the thumbnails which are JPEG)
thank you for your advice，I have double checked that I haven’t turned off save individual frames.
To paraphrase @Bulbulatoric Thanks you.Could you also list the software that you are using in the video for creating the images in your video? And I know with any new software there will be a steep learning curve. Again thank you
thank you so much. I only use PixInsight - there's definitely a learning curve, I know
Thanks for the video, really helpful... but also thanks for the idea of the external NVMe drive.. now I can sit processing in silence rather than listening to my external drive clicking away for hours :)
Thank you very much for sharing your excellent tutorial, much appreciated
Cant you just stack photos from several days in the app by selecting them from the folder?
Yes you can if it’s the same target
Well Siril will now stack mosaics automatically using either a normal script or Python script which Siril will also load for you automatically. Its spooky Magic !. it will assemble the auto mosaic from Seestar App as well as you own shooting via ALP. even from multiple nights.