New Starnet (In Case You Missed It...)

[Mike Lewis]

So I'm guessing many if not all of our accomplished astroimagers here might have already tumbled to the new version 2 Starnet release that just came out a little while ago. I just stumbled into it within the last week and was instantly very impressed with how much more capable it is over the already well accomplished original version. So in case you missed it, or haven't had the chance to play with it yet, I present a couple of examples. These 2 images represented 2 very difficult targets for the original starnet to handle, and ultimately I did not use starnet in the processing. So I used them as some tough test cases and I was VERY impressed with the new V2 results. I present 2 separate images, 3 versions of each - one with stars, one with stars removed by the original starnet, and finally one with the new V2 of Starnet. I think the results speak for themselves...Since the naming on FocalWorld's Gallery does not let me see the entire filename, we will see what order these get posted in...I will trybto label them correctly after the fact anyway. There is no additional editing to any of these btw.

Veil, with stars:

Veil, Original Starnet star removal:

Veil, Starnet V2 star removal:

Markarian's Chain original:

Markarian's Original Starnet, look what happens to the small galaxy cores...

Starnet V2 version:

 

[JimFox]

Thanks Mike. I had just seen they had come out with version 2. Overall it seems to work better, though there are still a bunch of bright areas in your Markarian's Chain image. It seemed to work better in your Veil edit.

Have you compared this to StarExterminator? That's the one I really want to look at.

But I will say the Version 2 of Starnett is definitely better then it's original version. Can you add the download link to where people can download it if they wanted?

 

[Mike Lewis]

Thanks Mike. I had just seen they had come out with version 2. Overall it seems to work better, though there are still a bunch of bright areas in your Markarian's Chain image. It seemed to work better in your Veil edit.

Have you compared this to StarExterminator? That's the one I really want to look at.

But I will say the Version 2 of Starnet is definitely better then it's original version. Can you add the download link to where people can download it if they wanted?

Jim,

I have compared it to Star XTerminator. I would say those 2 programs are now pretty close - sometimes better with one, sometimes better with the other.

As you say the Markarian's image has some glows, mostly from the larger blue stars. from experience that type of thing is not too bad to remove, and certainly more manageable than trying to restore the cores of galaxies...More to play with, but V2 is definitely an improvement, and the PI module running on the GPU is very easy to use if you are already using PI, so I will likely stay with that for now.

ML