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We are glad to announce the release of MLDenoise, a new machine learning tool for noise reduction of astronomical deep-sky images. This is a preview of the next generation of machine-learning PixInsight tools that we'll be releasing in the coming weeks and months, including noise reduction, star removal, deconvolution, and other tasks where specialized neural networks can help solve intractable or ill-posed problems with hardware acceleration. This release is for the macOS ARM64 (Apple...

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...

We have just released a new version of PixInsight: 1.9.4 Lockhart build 1695. This release provides stability improvements and bug fixes on all supported operating systems. Refer to the official announcement of version 1.9.4 Lockhart for complete information on new features, changes, and known problems in the current versions of PixInsight. See also the previous 1.9.4 build 1693 announcement for information on recent changes and improvements. Installation Installation packages for...

We have just released a new version of PixInsight: 1.9.4 Lockhart build 1693. This release provides stability improvements and bug fixes on all supported operating systems. Refer to the official announcement of version 1.9.4 Lockhart for complete information on new features, changes, and known problems in the current versions of PixInsight. Installation Installation packages for PixInsight 1.9.4 Lockhart build 1693 are now available to all licensed users for Linux, macOS (ARM64 and x64...

We have released a new version of PixInsight today: 1.9.4 Lockhart. This release provides stability improvements, bug fixes, and new features on all supported operating systems. We are also releasing the first macOS ARM64 (native Apple Silicon) version of PixInsight. Installation Installation packages for PixInsight 1.9.4 Lockhart are now available to all licensed users for Linux, macOS (ARM64 and x64 architectures), and Windows: https://pixinsight.com/dist/ As with all PixInsight core...

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...

As most readers already know, I have been working hard for more than one year to replace the old SpiderMonkey 24 engine, which has been powering our JavaScript runtime since 2015, with a completely new, entirely redesigned, and fully rewritten runtime based on V8, Google's high-performance, open-source JavaScript and WebAssembly engine. This monumental work is now complete, and the new runtime, available in version 1.9.4 Lockhart of PixInsight, has been thoroughly tested for stability and...

“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...

Hi all, I am pleased to announce the release of Weighted Batch Preprocessing version 2.9.0 which introduces a highly requested feature: the Frame Selection Step. This new capability allows you to analyze, visualize, and select the best frames before integration using objective metrics such as FWHM, eccentricity, PSF Signal Weight, and more, with the ability to define custom formulas for personalized selection criteria. Table of Contents The New Frame Selection Step The Frame Selection...