There’s finally a new star removal tool out there that’s worth looking at. It’s called Zenith-V1 by Syqon. It’s available as a script for both Siril and SetiAstroSuite, not sure about PI but I can’t imagine it won’t make its way there at some point.
The first time I tried it on some M-51 Ir data, I thought it wasn’t working well. My resulting starless image had a lot of small dots left behind. My first thought was “fail” but when I looked closer I realized that those dots were all very small field galaxies that are normally mistaken for stars and removed by Starnet++ so that impressed me. I tried it on a few other images and I have to say it worked very well. The biggest overall difference is that it leaves a very clean starless image behind. Almost no clumps or ghosts of the brighter stars in the field. If you’ve spent time with blemish blaster or a clone stamp cleaning your starless images up, you’ll know what I mean. The only thing to keep in mind is that it is used post stretch, not pre. It doesn’t need to be the final stretch but it needs at least a light statistical stretch to work properly.
