Most of our data gathering happens in an automated fashion. However, a strong gust of wind, a plane flying over, or a neighbor’s spotlight could cause one of your images to be garbage.
For the Bad Tracking and Fuzzy images, PixInsight would most likely discard these due to the poor quality.
The Dim Streak image can be allowed because overall, the image is good and the streak of light is dim. This streak will get averaged out in the image processing workflow.
On the other hand, the Bright Streak image was not discarded, PixInsight would try to integrate the image. Because the streak is fairly bright, you might see the residual streak in the final image (just much dimmer). This would require you to restart the processing workflow, wasting many hours of time
Blink
Blink is extremely easy to run, just launch the process Process – Image Inspection – Blink
Select the Folder icon to select your files.
Once the files are imported, you want to apply an automatic histogram transformation (top button next to image preview window) to all images, or they will most likely be too dark to discern bad frames. The stretch is temporary.
As you scan through the images, deselect the ones that are of poor quality. When finished reviewing, select the Move selected files to a new location button. These will be the files you will use in your pre-processing workflow.
Create a Movie
Although not applicable for this part of the process, you can have Blink create a movie file from your selected images. This would be useful for planetary imaging (especially Jupiter) to show cloud rotation. To do this, you simply add all of your processed frames, and select Crop and Create Video.