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Old 27-04-2016, 05:20 PM
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RickS (Rick)
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Join Date: Apr 2010
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Quote:
Originally Posted by troypiggo View Post
I'm confused by "Rick's method" of software binning. What's the actual process here? Image capture at 1x1 for L and RGB I assume. But what exactly is "software binning" and how would that benefit you in terms of image capture time? Must be missing something here.
In PixInsight you'd do software binning with IntegerResample (downsample by 2 in Average mode). As with hardware x2 binning you end up with 1/4 of the pixels but twice the per-pixel SNR.

The only difference between hardware and software binning is that you may get a reduction in read noise with hardware binning. If you're sky limited or have a sensor that doesn't bin well (looking at you KAF-*) then this is pretty much irrelevant.

I wouldn't actually do what I suggested. The software binning is really just acting as a noise reduction technique and there are better ways to do that. Since noise tends to be clustered at small spatial scales and low brightness levels, something like MultiscaleLinearTransform with a linear mask will do a better job IMHO.

Cheers,
Rick.
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