When I started doing Astrophotography of Deep Space Objects I started off using Nebulosity3 for capturing, pre-processing ie: stacking, stretching, noise reduction etc. While Nebulosity3 is fantastic, and I didn’t really have a need to switch to anything else, I couldn’t help but continually see references to the experienced photographers using PixInsight to do all their pre-processing. I grabbed a 45 day free trial of PixInsight and I can saw that while the learning curve is pretty crazy I found that my image processing improved significantly.
I think I spent a night alone watching the great video tutorials at Harry’s Astro Shed and ended up reprocessing a set of sub exposures I did a few weeks back of the M16 ‘Eagle Nebula. While I didn’t do any Darks, Flats or Bias frames the resulting image in my opinion came out really really well. I’m sure as I learn and play more with PixInsight the better my images will become. I do still use Nebulosity3 to do the actual image capturing but from now on I think PixInsight will be my tool of choice.
Next stop; upgrade from an old DSLR to an Astro CCD (once I decide if I’m going Mono or One Shot Colour that is!)..