Nebulosity or Pixinsight?

[milan]

So i have been playing with Nebulosity on my mac and have been informed by 'skye at night' (thanks BTW) about pixinsight.

So which should i go with to purchase? (not tried pixinsight yet) Since ive only just got into imaging ive a lot to learn and im sure that i will end up with some sort of guiding in the near future. My understanding is that pixinsight doesnt offer guiding like nebulosity so i would need to look for an alternative method? If so what would i look at?

What are the pros and cons for each (disregarding the quite large price difference) Also, i do have a copy of photoshop.

Thanks

[SteveL]

Nebulosity doesnt support guiding either. It supports a link to PHD to allow for dithering between frames.

Neb and PI provide completely different options. PI is *ONLY* an image processing tool, Neb does some image capture and some image processing.

[skye at night]

Hello again...

I am currently trying to do a side-by-side comparison of the two on an M31 stack...

I have just posted the 'all-Nebulosity' version on the deep sky area (although at 135mm is more of a widefield)... Fairly happy with that for the moment...

My attempts at doing the same with Pixinsight have so far been not so good.. I am finding it a bit 'buggy' and the 'user-interface' ie its poppy-outey floaty - draggy tool type set-up is not my thing ..

I prefer the way that Nebulosity stacks the images , although it requires more input by the user, but this does seem to allow tighter control on things...

Pixinsight has a couple of useful features to make use of early on..

1 - the custom angle rotate which i havent found on Nebulosity anyway (only 90 deg increments) good if you want to crop out as little as possible.

2 - the Dynamic background Extraction tool is very good and removes gradients caused by vignetting, secondary/image chip size issues etc...

If I could save in pixinsight (only got non save demo) I would export at this point to Nebulosity and go from there...

There are good video tutorials (Harry's and others) on Pixinsight and good text/picture tutorials on the Nebulosity site. Craig Stark actually does one himself on the crop feature and DBE in Pixinsight so he must value this himself.. perhaps similar will appear in future versions?

I will try to get a PI version of M31 completed to (at least on my screen) do a comparison. But at the moment I am bending towards continuing with Nebulosity and just making more use of its functions, having so far only used it for stacking. If I am going to spend any more money on software it will be a PS upgrade ... firstly because it seems to work very well as a further processing tool post-Nebulosity and because it has obvious wider uses in other areas of photography.

Hope I haven't confused things even further,

Steve

[harry page]

Hi

I have never used Neb , so can not offer much help there

I think what most people do is use 1 package to capture their images ( I use astro art 4) and to get the best from their image use a different package.

I must admit most people use photoshop, but I use the new boy on the block Pixinsight

Good luck

Harry

[harry page]

Hi Steve

I think you will find the Pixinsight demo is not limited in any way other than a 30 day demo

You can save your images

Harry

[skye at night]

That's the 'buggy' bit for me harry..

wont save anything.. jpeg, fits, tiff bmp... nothing...

Will be having another go though.

Steve

[skye at night]

Hi

I have never used Neb , so can not offer much help there

I think what most people do is use 1 package to capture their images ( I use astro art 4) and to get the best from their image use a different package.

I must admit most people use photoshop, but I use the new boy on the block Pixinsight

Good luck

Harry

I think if astroart ran on the mac I would have a look at that...

Would you recommend it Harry? Do images need a finish off in PS?

Steve

[harry page]

Hi Steve

I have checked and no else ( To date) has reported a saving bug

Please let us know if you still have a problem

AA4 does a great job at capture , calibration, but only offers basic

image processing and does need another package to get the best from your work , hence my use of pixinsight.

Regards Harry

[milan]

Thanks all, would be good to get your comparison Stephen if you manage to get PI to save.

[PortableAstronomer]

Hello, I thought I'd share some examples of how powerful the Dynamic Background Extraction (DBE) feature is on PixInsight LE.

In both photos, the inset shows the original stack when stretched using histogram curves, and the amount of light pollution around even when using an IDAS filter.

The main photo shows the effect of using the DBE tool in PixInsight.

These were taken last night from a backyard in Medemblik, Netherlands, from 6 metres below sea-level.

Equipment for these pics: Skywatcher Equinox 80, WO FF III, 5x4 min subs on QHY8 CCD with 9V cooling (thanks to Steve L for the tip), standard Bias & Flat frames.

Stacked in DeepSkyStacker, processed in PixInsight LE.

Cheers

Chris

[milan]

Very nice