Over the 2025/2026 winter, I decided to purchase a few things. One was a DELL 27″ 4K monitor. The other is PixInsight. The DELL monitor works great and makes it very easy to view and edit my astrophotos as I develop them using PixInsight. My astrophotography work cycle is to acquire all of my DSO image data during one summer and spend the following winter developing the photos and publishing them here on my website. Learning PixInsight slowed down my work cycle, but the results I am getting with PixInsight cause me to stop and stare at my 4K display. Some of my 2025 astrophotos are amazing. I know that I can experiment with pixel math and different colour palettes with PixInsight…but right now I am enjoying the RGB colour that I get directly from my QHY294C colour camera.
Some of the 2025 photos were acquired over several nights. PixInsight’s WBPP calibration/registration/stacking script does a wonderful job. When I purchased PixInsight, I also bought 3 of the RC-Astro plug-ins for PixInsight. These were BlurXTerminator, NoiseXTerminator and StarXTerminator. They are AI-powered and developed by Russell Croman. They perform very well and are responsible for my spending far too much time just staring in awe at my 2025 astrophotos. He also won an award from the Photographic Society of America for his work.
Because his plug-ins are AI based, they consume a lot of CPU and GPU time…but the results are always worth the wait. These plugins are designed to take advantage of your graphic card GPU. Right now, this is true for some NVIDIA graphics cards. My laptop has an AMD Ryzen 7 5700U with Radeon Graphics so I have to wait for Mr. Croman to come out with a method to utilize an AMD system.
The BlurXTerminator plugin uses AI to determine how to correct issues with stars, such as ovality or RGB colour alignment. It does not create new stars or change the colour of existing stars. BlurXTerminator also uses AI to apply the equivalent of a deconvolution, which does a great job of sharpening your images. I tend to oversharpen my images too much…I’m sure I’ll back off sharpening eventually…maybe. NoiseXTerminator does a great job using AI to eliminate Poisson Noise. Most of my Astrophoto data is less than 4 hours of integration, and NoiseXTerminator yields silky smooth images.
I really like the StarXTerminator plugin. So much so that I chose to include the starless images for many of my 2025 astrophotos. I think they allow the viewer to better appreciate the nebulosity and the vast “landscapes” they create.
I hope you enjoy browsing my 2025 astrophotos
Peter
P.S. Be sure to scroll to the bottom of this page to see an interesting detail regarding the Tulip Nebula astrophoto…
The bright nebula in the starless image below is named Sharpless 101 (Sh2-101). It is also called the Tulip Nebula. If you look closely, you will notice a faint egg-shaped blob immediately above the Tulip Nebula. The left lobe of this egg-shaped blob has been identified as a Bow shock generated by the Black Hole Cygnus X-1.
Cygnus X-1 is one of the strongest X-ray sources detectable from Earth. Cygnus X-1 is a high-mass X-ray binary system located about 7,000 light-years away. The event horizon of Cygnus X-1 is estimated to be 600 km in diameter. 600 km is approximately a fraction of a fraction of a pixel in the photo. Of course, the other issue is that a Black Hole’s event horizon is pitch black because no light can escape from it. So the Black Hole is not visible, but because it is a binary system, we can see its companion star.
Below, I have created a close-up that has Cygnus X-1’s blue supergiant variable star companion identified with a grey arrow. This 21 solar mass supergiant and its 15 solar mass companion black hole are separated by 0.2 AU, or 20% of the distance from Earth to the Sun. The period of this binary system is 5.8 days. I also noticed what looks like a relativistic jet streaming downward towards the left, but I can’t find any online reference confirming this.
Cygnus X-1 was the subject of a famous science wager between Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne. Hawking bet that Cygnus X-1 was not a black hole…hoping to lose.
Peter
Tim,
Cygnus-X1 is indeed slowly consuming it’s supergiant variable star companion. As this black hole rips matter from it’s companion star, it becomes superheated to incredibly high temperatures just before it falls into Cygnus-X1’s event horizon and disappears forever. The superheated matter is one of the main reasons Cygnus-X1 is also one of the largest X-ray sources in our night sky.
The very small distance between these binary companions star combined with there distance from Earth being approximately 7,000 Lightyears means that they are essentially one object. A deadly object giving off incredibly deadly amounts of energy.
Peter
The black hole and the super-giant are only 20% the distance between Earth and our Sun apart… how does that super-giant not get sucked into the black hole? Mind-blowing! Phenomenal images.