How to Stack Seestar Mosaics Using WBPP in PixInsight

[@PandaBurrie]

Great job! The post processing on those does look significantly better! Also, can confirm, the remote star parties are a blast 💥

[@Naztronomy]

Thank you and it's always a pleasure having you at the parties 😊

[@texasman2907]

Really enjoyed the video and came at just the right time as I was trying to figure out how to get better results out of my S50 combining data from multiple nights that were not quite centered in the same area. Will give this a shot and see what kind of results I get! Thanks again and keep these kind of videos coming!

[@Naztronomy]

Glad this was helpful! Let me know how it goes and feel free to reach out with questions.

[@ErnestGWilsonII]

Nicely done! Thank you for making this video and sharing it with all of us. I am of course subscribed with notifications enabled and thumbs up! - Ernie in Pennsylvania

[@Naztronomy]

Thanks so much, Ernie!

[@zalllon]

This is really great to see! I’ve been on the fence between spending more money on a traditional set up (EQM-35, ASI585 MC Pro, RedCat 51, ASIAIR Plus) or getting another 1 or 2 S50s. This method would make it easier to combine data from more than one S50 where they are either all set to mosaic, or set to different points of M 31 (for this example).

[@Naztronomy]

That's a cool idea! I've thought about trying to gather some friends with the S50 and all take images of the same object and combine them later. It'll be a massive project but should be fun!

[@matthiasschnetzler7395]

Are you aware of seestar alp? There you can set up a federation of seestars and assign each of them a panel of a mosaic

[@Naztronomy]

@@matthiasschnetzler7395 I've been following the seestar alp repo for a while and I'm in their discord. It's an awesome project! I haven't gone past running it locally.

[@syl5986]

Superbe vidéo enfin un vrai tuto avec des explications claires sur pixinsight avec wbpp 🙏. Pour revenir en arrière avec wbpp il suffit simplement de modifier le nom du fichier que nous avons copié par le nom original et mettre un autre nom sur le fichier modifié ?

[@Naztronomy]

Désolé pour le retard et également désolé si mon message contient des erreurs, j'ai utilisé Google Translate pour répondre. Content que vous ayez apprécié la vidéo ! Pour répondre à votre question, si je comprends bien, alors oui, c'est tout ce que vous devez faire. Copiez BPP-engine.js et renommez la copie en "BPP-engine.orig.js" (ou quelque chose de similaire), puis modifiez l'autre fichier BPP-engine.js.

[@FrogsInOrbit]

12 hours in and going strong. I only got 350 failed subs out of 6700, when the other method outlined in my video cost me 1500 subs. So already way happier with this. Just hope I don't have any memory issues :-) Thanks for a great video!

[@Naztronomy]

Awesome, that's great to hear! Did you increase the sensitivity in the registration parameters? If not, maybe next time :)

[@FrogsInOrbit]

@@Naztronomy Yes, put them both to 75. I don't cull my subs in advance so I'm really not upset with losing 350. That would be about normal for registration on just normal FOV seestar subs. Maybe a little higher than normal, but within an acceptable range that it won't cause unmanageable signal disparity (I hope!)

[@MarvoMarverson]

Thank you for this tutorial! I have two mosaics of M31 across two consecutive nights. I just attempted this and ended up with 914/973 frames failing to register. I'm pretty new an inexperienced with Pixinsight. Do you have any suggestions on where to troubleshoot this?

[@MarvoMarverson]

Turns out I had a typo in "SA.intersection = StarAlignment.prototype.Always;" and it obviously did not work with the typo 🙃. After fixing the typo 968/973 registered! Thanks again!

[@Naztronomy]

@@MarvoMarverson Awesome! Glad you were able to troubleshoot! Are you on the latest version of PI? Asking just to make sure it still works on there. I've had two people tell me that it doesn't work but 4 others have said it works.

[@MarvoMarverson]

@Naztronomy yep latest version (1.9.1). There are some slight UI differences in the WBPP script. That said I was able to figure out how to navigate the changes. Worked well for me. I’m now trying this method to combine 3574 subs. 973 of which were taken with mosaic mode and the remaining were taken before mosaic mode existed and were manual attempts to cover M31. Interested to see what how that works out.

[@robertwiley3062]

Thank you for this solution. I will be attempting it today with a couple of mosaic nights on the Witch Head nebula. Question: Will the changes to the BPP-engine file affect how WBPP runs on non-mosaic stacking? Can the code change remain?

[@Naztronomy]

The changes make WBPP a bit more sensitive so that it rejects fewer frames. Keeping it on won't affect anything other than the star registration so frames that may normally get rejected will now be registered. Any future official updates to PixInsight may override the custom code, just something to keep in mind. Good luck! Curious to hear how it goes for you.

[@robertwiley3062]

Thanks for the quick reply and the info. First test underway with 450 subs from Night 1. Thirty minutes in...

[@robertwiley3062]

SUCCESS! 442 frames in 45 minutes. Thank you for this solution! Subscribed and liked!

[@Naztronomy]

Awesome, really glad to hear it worked! Happy to have earned your sub 😊

[@robertwiley3062]

Second test also successful! 750 subs with only 9 failures. Prior to finding your video and script changes, I had already been playing with CatalogStatGenerator to no avail. Your settings in the video worked like a champ. Thanks again!

[@danman6431]

Hey Naz! I enjoyed you video even though I dont own a Seestar nor have Pixinsight. Although I do have Siril but I dont use it. Can you do the same thing in Siril or any other kind of software? I have pre ordered the S30 and dont want to drop another 300 on a software hahaa.

[@Naztronomy]

Thank you! Siril has a Seestar processing script that you can use. However, it doesn't work with Mosaics. I'm working on a way to figure out how to do it there. Will definitely share if I figure it out 😊 I totally understand about not spending more money. This hobby is expensive enough as it is!

[@michaeldiaz4942]

I know you are trying to recapture the data that was lost on the edges on the original mosaic. What I'm curious is if this process would work on combining the subs from multiple mosaics that are offset from each other. I'm currently working on capturing the California Nebula but even a 2x on my S50 does not capture the FOV I want.

[@Naztronomy]

Yeah this should work if you generate a larger synthetic reference frame. You can have as wide of an area as you'd like but keep in mind that it could slow down the stacking because it'll be a lot more work for PI.

[@syl5986]

Ne fonctionne plus avec la nouvelle mise a jour?

[@robertwiley3062]

Naz, does the upgrade to 1.9 Lockhart have any impact on your BPP-engine editing instructions in this video?

[@Naztronomy]

One person reported t hat it's not working anymore. I haven't had a chance to upgrade yet but I will upgrade and see if I can figure out a workaround. Will post an update as soon as I have one.

[@robertwiley3062]

I can confirm that the changes to BPP-engine.js did produce a mosaic without failure in 1.9.0 Lockhart.

[@Naztronomy]

Awesome, thank you for confirming! I also upgraded to 1.9.0 and attempted my mosaics and can also confirm it still works. Great to have someone else confirm as well!

[@caspase888]

Can’t the mosaic subs / files be stacked as an extended fov image in DeepSlyStacker?

[@Naztronomy]

Unfortunately you'll have issues when you register them in DSS. I just did a quick test and the failure rate was really high because some of the frames were really far from each other. The only place I've been able to do this is in Pixinsight. I'm trying to figure this out in Siril now.

[@andreiamendes4971]

I only have the folder WeightedBatchPreprocessing

[@FrogsInOrbit]

You are probably using an older version of PI. That's what mine looks like too. You are still changing the same information. Just the name has weighted in front but the files names are similar.

[@Naztronomy]

Yeah @FrogsInOrbit has it right. Pixinsight recently changed the folder structure of their scripts. You can either update PI or edit the WeightedBatchPreprocessing file.

[@FrogsInOrbit]

Any idea if this is faster than the method I outlined in my video for stacking mosaic subs?

[@Naztronomy]

I wasn't aware of that video, you did a great job with your explanation and demo! Yeah, I believe this is faster and also requires fewer manual interventions once you get the StarAlignment attributes set. The frame failure rate is also less since I turn up the sensitivity quite a bit which helps.

[@FrogsInOrbit]

@@Naztronomy Cool, I'll give it a shot on my next project! I've been running into problems with the integration of the subs as it is giving me out of memory issues. So I'm hoping a WBPP version will rectify that. Thanks for the video!

[@Naztronomy]

Good luck! Let me know if you have questions.

[@Caden158]

fast integration breaks with this script in 1.9.2

[@Naztronomy]

Don't do fast integration because that skips a whole bunch of steps in order to make it fast. I tested this on 1.9.1 and it works fine there and the changes on 1.9.2 shouldn't be significant enough to affect that but I won't be able to test until next week. Let me know if non-fast integration works for you.

[@Caden158]

@Naztronomy how do i disable fast integration

[@Caden158]

nvm disabled it

[@Caden158]

@@Naztronomy im getting 99% of my frames to be failed in the registration bit of wbpp, ive increased the sensitivity to a high amount too and decreased it and literally nothing is working

[@Naztronomy]

@@Caden158 99% failed even with the code updates?