Using wbpp is it still necessary to manually blink through the frames?

i've waisted a lot of time running wbpp, to frequently find that i have to pick my reference frames manually (especially when it comes to local normalization).

Some subs may contain halo around brighter stars due to high clouds or fog, others may be out of focus - I usually remove them from the folder, because WBPP takes them with others. The script sorts other problems easily - from my experience.

I use Subframe Selector first, then Blink. Relying on WBPP to remove bad subs has never worked for me.

I Blink all my Light subs and toss the bad ones.  I then run Cosmetic Correction CFA - Auto Detect, Hot Signa 3.0 for my OSC.  For mono don't select CFA.

I Blink all my Light subs and toss the bad ones.  I then run Cosmetic Correction CFA - Auto Detect, Hot Signa 3.0 for my OSC.  For mono don't select CFA.

I absolutely still blink my frames and expect I will always need to. There are three major things I look for… The first is airplanes. While I find WBPP does a great job on removing satellite trails, airplanes seem to be a bridge too far in my experience (at least with my data). The second thing I look for is frames that are significantly out of focus or perhaps misaligned from the rest of the frames. This happens to me if the remote observatory closes for a couple hours due to cloud cover or wind and then re-opens. The telescope will have drifted a bit in those couple hours, and it may be a frame or two before it re-centers. Focus will also have changed in the couple of hours, and the telescope will not have been able to successfully re-focus without any stars. So it might be a couple or three frames before I am getting good results again. The poor focus frames would likely be caught by WBPP (if the focus was bad enough), but the misalignment won't be, and then the autocrop may lose more real estate than I would want. I'm better off removing those frames. The third thing I look for is halos from thin passing clouds. I don't want those included in the stack, even with a lower weighting. The fourth thing I look for is the effects of wind. My scope has a tendency to create stars with little spikes in RA if the wind speed gets above 6mph, and WBPP will not eliminate those frames (though it will weight them lower).

So, I continue to blink.

On the plus side, I rarely bother with subframe selector now. WBPP does about as good a job in weighting as I could do using subframe selector. There are a couple of exceptions, but they are beyond the scope of this discussion.

Blink is cool but I dont like the fact you have to select files and all that. It's a bit cumbersome. 

It's better to use ASIFITSVIEWER instead IMO. It will blink just as fast (all you need to do is hold the arrow key and it will blink through your frames pretty damn fast), and you can just simply press DEL on any image you want to delete and move on. All you need to do is navigate to the directory where your images are. No need to open PIX, Load files, select files, etc etc etc. It's way more simplified: goto directory, open file (ASIFITSVIEW is my default now), and hold arrow until i see something i dont like. If i see somethign I dont like, I hit DEL key and it goes to Recycle Bin and I just move on. So. Simple. Blink sucks. And the stretching is inconsistent. Just my 2c. Try it yourself and see.

Me too, I trust machines and alghoritms, but not up to this point  
I had a lot of situations where some clouds passed by or wind…  always use Blink as a first step to decide if the frame is "ok" or not.

Dean Ostergaard:
WBPP can't actually "see" your image. It could be full of tree branches or maybe you got a nice shot of the side of your house with the stars reflecting off a window. Or a local pilot decided to photobomb your image of M 74. WBPP and the Subframe Selector for that matter are only analyzing numbers.

I have an artificial horizon created in NINA - no trees, roofs, chimneys etc. in my subs.

Not absolutely essential, but highly recommended IMO. WBPP is nice but not perfect. There's always some frame you want to reject that the weight selection would no pick, or you rather go for different reference frame,…

Matt Simmons:

Anderl:
hey guys,

a very short question. 
do I need to manually blink through all my frames, sort them out etc. or is the wbpp script good enough to do that?
I mean it is doing subframe weighting as well as excluding not fitting frames. 

cs
andi

I don't use Blink - I think it kinda sucks. I use Subframe Selector with the following formula to cull my subs (credit to Sky Story YT channel who did a video about this method here Faster Subframe Selection With the Sigma Formula): 

FWHMSigma <= 2 &&
EccentricitySigma <=2 &&
MedianSigma <=2 &&
StarsSigma >= -1.5

I find those four criteria weeds out out-of-focus (FWHM), bad guiding / wind (eccentricity), and loss of signal due to background brightness, clouds, etc. (Median, Stars). The Sigma keyword removes anything that is outside of 2 units of deviation from the group. In the Subframe Selector tool you will see charts with two grey bars in the middle. The dark grey is 1 sigma on either side of median, the light grey is 2 sigma. For stars you want anything that is greater than 1.5 sigma below median. Of course, adjust to your taste, but I have found this weeds out all of the low quality subframes and some of the subframes of questionable quality. You can always double click on an image in the list to see it for yourself and manually cull or keep it.

After that, I load all the "approved" images into WBPP and turn-off subframe weighting. I don't see the point in doing all of that a second time. What I found is that leaving it on took more processing time and never resulted in any additional images being removed.

Cliff still blinks his sub-frames using Irfanview and culls there pretty aggressively as well. I really like his formulas but if you don't check your images . . . Well, less than 2 standard deviations from bad is still bad.

William:
Blink is cool but I dont like the fact you have to select files and all that. It's a bit cumbersome. 

It's better to use ASIFITSVIEWER instead IMO. It will blink just as fast (all you need to do is hold the arrow key and it will blink through your frames pretty damn fast), and you can just simply press DEL on any image you want to delete and move on. All you need to do is navigate to the directory where your images are. No need to open PIX, Load files, select files, etc etc etc. It's way more simplified: goto directory, open file (ASIFITSVIEW is my default now), and hold arrow until i see something i dont like. If i see somethign I dont like, I hit DEL key and it goes to Recycle Bin and I just move on. So. Simple. Blink sucks. And the stretching is inconsistent. Just my 2c. Try it yourself and see.

I agree and also prefer the ASIFitsViewer, but the Blink has one nice feature. The ASIFitsViewer calculates the STF for every image and you don't know it some are brighter or darker than others unless you look at the histogram in the meantime (which isn't very convenient). The Blink keeps the STF.