Articles by Vicent Peris

We are glad to announce MARS Data Release 2, now available for download from the PixInsight Software Distribution System. Once downloaded, you can select the new database in MultiscaleGradientCorrection. MARS DR2 is meant to replace the DR1 database, so now you can configure MGC with MARS DR2 1.0.3 and MARS-u DR1 1.0.1, as shown below: The new MARS database is the result of a year and a half of observations, accumulating more than 1,000 hours of exposure time. The main improvement of...

Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet — Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions. The Artemis II mission is an emotive event and offers a unique opportunity. Our vision was to show the spacecraft flying over deep-sky objects. This would be a very unusual picture for one reason: the capsule's distance from Earth allows for long-exposure photography. By comparison, this is impossible with the ISS. Therefore, the image would show the crewed spacecraft diving...

“Immediate enjoyment” does not give rise to beauty, since the beauty of a thing is revealed “much later,” in the light of another, through the significance of a reminiscence. Beauty responds to duration, to a contemplative synthesis. Beauty is not the flash or fleeting attraction, but a persistence, a phosphorescence of things. The temporality of beauty is very different from that of the “cinematic parade of things.” The age of haste, with its “cinematic” succession of fleeting presents, has...

MultiscaleAdaptiveStretch version 1.1 comes with two new features. Now, we can fine tune the Contrast Recovery option using the Intensity slider. Contrast Recovery allows to have a contrast level similar to a delinearization using a midtones transfer function while preserving the star profiles. Now, we can choose how much we want to recover the contrast. A good example is the Orion nebula. Without Contrast Recovery, we can compress the dynamic range to preserve the structures inside the...

MultiscaleAdaptiveStretch (MAS, for short) is an image delinearization tool based on statistical and multiscale analysis. It has the following goals: Bypassing the traditional PixInsight STF - HistogramTransformation workflow to perform a consistent delinearization in an image set. Apply a robust delinearization based exclusively on statistical properties of the target image. This provides a uniform nonlinear image representation, a basic requirement for composition techniques like LRGB...