How much does PixInsight cost?

As of updating this FAQ entry (April 2016), the price of a commercial PixInsight license is 260 USD approximately.

Is PixInsight worth the money?

PixInsight is an excellent tool. It was designed explicitly for astrophotography, and it solves the problems we face very well. It DOES have a learning curve, but at it’s core, it isn’t more complicated than learning PS the first time. It’s well worth the cost.

How hard is PixInsight?

Well-known member. It is indeed true that Pixinsight is hard to learn. With over 100 processes and a similar number of scripts it can seem overwhelming. It is particularly hard because it does not come with any “beginner’s guide” documentation.

How much RAM do I need for PixInsight?

8 GiB
RAM. Minimum required amount of RAM: 8 GiB on a 64-bit machine and operating system.

Is PixInsight better than DSS?

IMHO – PixInsight is much better than DSS as far as calibration and alignment.

How many cores does PixInsight use?

Minimum recommended processor: An AMD Ryzen or Ryzen Threadripper CPU, or an Intel Core i9/i10 or Xeon, with at least 8 or 12 processor cores.

Can PixInsight use GPU?

“As of writing this document (February 2014), the current versions 1.8. x of PixInsight don’t make direct use of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs).

Does PixInsight do stacking?

​Pre-processing (Calibrating and Stacking) Images in PixInsight. For a long time, the likes of DeepSkyStacker has been used for pre-processing of images. This process involves the following: Stacking many bias frames to produce a master bias.

What is drizzle PixInsight?

Drizzle is an algorithm for the linear reconstruction of images from undersampled, dithered data. The new DrizzleIntegration tool brings this fundamental image processing technique to the PixInsight platform to fill a long-standing gap in our image preprocessing tool set.

What does drizzle do in astrophotography?

​Drizzle is a simple algorithm that creates an image that is larger than the images in the stack and interpolates between pixels to ensure it reproduces fine detail in edges despite the effects of stacking transformations.

How does debayer work on a pixinsight camera?

When the files out of the camera are saved as FITS files, this information is only included if the keyword ‘BAYERPAT’ is supported by the capturing software. After debayering, all further processing is working on RGB (color) images, unless you split the image into the individual 3 color channels by the ChannelExtraction process.

How to debayer an image in Astroart and pixinsight?

FITS format is where confusion arises – for instance PixInsight and AstroArt disagree over the bayer format of an image. Take an image with the Hypercam 183C in RAW mode. To debayer it correctly in PixInsight, you must select RGGB, but in AstroArt you have to select GBRG.

What kind of RGB combination do you use for debayer?

During image processing eventually it comes to the point where you have to do debayering, after all it is a OSC camera. What RGB combination do you use? I use Nebulosity 4 for processing and stacking. This is the particular step I refer to: If I leave at default like on the image, the color balance is way off.

What kind of software does pixinsight use?

Since version 1.8.6 (released in December 2018) PixInsight uses LibRaw instead of DCRAW as raw decoding software. For astrophotography, RAW format preferences shall be set to ‘Pure raw’. PixInsight will then open images of a One Shot Color (OSC) camera as Color Filter Array (CFA) data.