Software question

Hi all,

I am introducing a new astronomy course at the college where I teach and much of the course will be about CCD imaging and processing. For my own processing and analysis, I have used MegaFix and CCDSoft. However MegaFix will not work in XP and for "pretty pictures" CCDSoft's processing is very limited. So I am looking for something else.

My question is, if you had the choise, would you purchase Maxim-DL/CCD or Mira?

Cheers,

Maurice

I've not used Mira. Maxim v4 is a very nearly complete platform for processing. Good alignment routines, sigma combine, image reduction, curves, many good-to-excellent filters including DDP and UM. Good color processing as well.

Tom Davis
Inkom, ID

Hello Maurice,

in my opinion Astroart 3.0 is just as good as the 2 softwares you mentioned and probably less expensive(I know directly only Maxim. Mira I read about on Ron Wodaski's book). May not be as fancy looking, but it is easy and very powerful both in image acquisition and processing.

Ciao
Luca

I too like MegaFix/SuperFix and was a bit disapointed when it wouldn't work with XP (Long conversation with Bruce....). Anyway I started to use the Astro Freeware by Christian Buil called Iris. It's every bit as powerful as M/DL but not quite as user friendly. It's free, and he updates it like monthly - give it a shot and see what you think.
http://www.astrosurf.com/buil/us/iris/iris.htm