StarNet++ Free Star Removal Tool for Astrophotography

I came across some interesting software called “StarNet++” which allows you to remove stars from your astronomy photos with retaliative ease.

Watch How Easy StarNet++ Is to Use!
Several Results at the end of the video… WOW what an improvement!

Nikita Misiura’s Orginal Update on StarNet++
https://www.astrobin.com/397290/

Software Download off Sourceforge.net https://sourceforge.net/projects/starnet/

The How-To Guide on Cloudy Nights
https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/651745-starnet-star-removing-software/

AstroBackyard’s Guide on StarNet++
https://astrobackyard.com/starnet-astrophotography/

So of Course I had to test it on the toughest star-filled photo I had… The Veil Nebula… now I started with my original photo which you can see here and I converted it to the required 16-BIT TIFF format.

William Optics RedCat51 Nikon Z6 – No Filter 77 x 120sec @ iso800

Drag and Drop the file on “rgb_starnet++.exe” and got the following output…

Starless Veil Nebula output from StarNet++

Okay so its not the prettiest job every, unsurprising given how that region of space is so compact with stars… I’m not sure if there is a way to change parameters to maybe get a better output.

However, I decided to combine the Star filled photo and the starless photo together with some curve adjustments on the starless photo get the a surprising good (and improved) final photo…

Viel Nebula after StarNet++ Process and Star “Lighten” back into the image

WOW! Thank you Nikita Misiura!
The final result is I was really able to pull out the nebulousity of the veil nebula, something I wasn’t able to do before because the stars ended up brighting as well! I’m going to give this treatment to a few photos now and see the results!

Some Additional Images I reprocessed from the Originals using the StarNet++ Technique to boost the (each image had a different adjustment method to recombine the stars with the starless images).

Final Note: There is a Pixinsight plug-in for StarNet++, however when I gave it a try it seems to “hang” the program while its working. At a certain point I think one test it “froze” so I’d suggest taking the extra step for now and exporting the 16-Bit Tiff and running it separately and then re-importing the starless file back to Pixinsight or to Adobe for further processing.

2 thoughts on “StarNet++ Free Star Removal Tool for Astrophotography

  1. The Sourceforge download link is gone. As of a few minutes ago you can’t get this at Sourceforge at all. I hope somebody can find an alternative link for this.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *