I've used the 178mm quite a bit, and fought this pattern noise quite a lot. 3 things helped me.
First, was using the "Pre-processing verticle and horizontal blur" option under 'Experimental features' in Autostakkert. This adds a temporary blur to the images being aligned and stacked, essentially eliminating the finest details (you can adjust the amount) so that the fine bayer pattern gets blurred and then ignored during the stacking. The blur is only temporary though and is not in the final stacked image.
2nd, was using 'drizzle' for the final stacked image. This seemed to lessen the effect a little bit more yet.
Even after those 2 steps, the bayer pattern was ultimately often the limiting factor in how much deconvolution I could apply to an image, especially images where the fine detail was on very small scales (like when using reducers), placing the fine detail on similar scales to the bayer matrix pattern noise.
If, however, that wasn't the case, and the detail I was trying to pull out was on a larger scale than the bayer pattern, I could do a 3rd step, which was, in Pixinsight, zoom into the smallest levels of detail and using small settings in the deconvolution tool, do a fine scale bluring, both horizontally and veritcally, using a 1x5 pixel pattern. This seemed to eliminate what remained of the pattern noise, albeit at the cost of the finest of detail, and allowed me to deconvolute the rest of the image a bit more than I could do without this third step.
Hope some of this helps. I've since moved on to a different camera (asi290mm), and all though it doesn't have the same framerate as the 178mm, it also doesn't appear to have that pattern noise in spite of pixels of the same size (when in bin1), and I admit its really nice not having to worry about that pattern noise when I go to process images, or hesitating when reaching for that reducer as it forces the fine details down closer to the same scale as the bayer noise, lol.
Edited by AJamesB, 26 April 2021 - 03:32 AM.
