New Book from Rogelio Bernal Andreo (RBA)

[STEVE333]

Last year I pre-ordered the new AP book (actually two books: the main book and a Reference book ) from RBA. Wasn't sure what to expect. Would his style be long-winded, complicated to understand, over my head, etc.? The other day I received the electronic copy of both the "Reference Book" and the Mastering PixInsight book.

Since I've recently changed from DSLR to NB imaging it's become increasingly important to a good job at removing the LP gradient from each of the NB channels individually before combining them. Sometimes ABE does the job and problem solved. However, it appears that often it will require using DBE which has always been a challenge for me. So I went to RBA's Mastering PixInsight book and found the section on DBE. It was only about 3 or 4 pages long (including some very informative pictures) and took about 10 minutes to read and understand. I learned more about DBE in those 10 minutes than I have from all the video tutorials I've ever watched. He provided a way to determine if the samples were placed properly, and, if they weren't, a way to determine which ones to remove. Having only scratched the surface of his new books I'm already very pleased and excited about looking into the remainder of the book(s).

The printed versions aren't expected to ship till at least late June.

Steve

[DEnc]

Thanks (again) Steve,

I just placed my order. I know Andreo's name as a collaborator on Warren Keller's video tutorials, but I didn't know he's published too.

Funny, when I search the web regarding my latest astrophotography puzzle I regularly encounter your posts to Astronomy Forums. It seems you're 3-5 years ahead of me!

Regards,

David

[Stuart]

I bought it too and I like it. I find the .pdf format a little annoying (it's not this book--it's me), so I'm waiting for the hard copy.

[STEVE333]

I read a bit more from the .pdf version of RBA's book, this time about the Pixinsight WeightedBatchPreprocessing (WBPP) script. I've always done image Precal manually (using a group of process icons). However, now that I've switched from DSLR to NB imaging I'm getting overwhelmed by the sheer number of separate calibration files as well as separate Light files. RBA's book motivated me to give the WBPP script a try. After working out a few problems (filter names of all things) I ran the WBPP script all the way to stacked images for some LRGB data. WBPP churned away for about 50 min before "spitting out" the Master cal files along with the 4 stacked (LRGB) images. All four images were aligned to each other which is is nice starting point for the later combination. The results appeared to be at least as good as my manual approach, and, a lot simpler. The image below is the LRGB result from the WBPP stacked images.

NGC4236_LRGB by STEPHEN KING, on Flickr

Steve