I am thinking about an alternative to IRAF which appears to be sliding into the abyss; so am seeking a recommendation for a processing set that works well on linux. I would be very happy to hear, please, what fellow KStars/INDI users find useful.
PixInsight
does everything I need to do. I'm probably only using 30% or 40% of its capabilities at best. It has a very rich feature set and it works natively on Linux.
Yes, PI is unbeatable at the moment. I do have insider knowledge of a package that's going to be better at certain things though, but can't tell about it yet.
Definitely definitely PixInsight. After you get over the learning curve it makes image processing very easy and does a fantastic job!! Plus, if you run into a difficult processing issue like a strange gradient or issues with binning or image geometry, it is powerful enough and has the tools to help you fix it.
Haha yes, it's a teaser. Not sure even if it's indeed going to be better ofcourse, but last time Pixinsight couldn't 100% align 2 images of mine (taken months apart with rotation of the tube in between) and his software could. Someone else had a Mosaic problem and that was also easily solved by it. It's a complete raw-data to result package. He's planning to release full details on a forum of which I'm a moderator, so stay tuned.
For the full control over the process you have two options AstroImageJ or PixInsight. The former is opensource java app and the latter is commercial software. I use both of them however PixInsight wins any battle in image processing, including calibration, alignment, stacking, postprocessing etc.
If you don't need everything in one place, there is
Siril
for calibration and stacking. For pretty-image processing, I used to use
Fitswork
, which runs on Windows but is also said to run with wine on Linux, though I didn't try that yet. And if you are into variables and exoplanet transits, there is
C-MuniPack
for differential photometry, which can also perform calibration
And they are all free
For most processing I am using Fitswork and Regim (www.andreasroerig.de/regim/regim_e.htm).
Regim is a very powerfull java software and its free.
I do all my processing in Linux and, yes, Fitswork is working very well under wine 1.8.