Posts Made By: Mike Unsold

Hi

The following image was captured last week using a Canon
D60 and 76mm TV @ F5. It is a 115 minute integration using
Canon 12-bit raw mode. Dark and light frames were first
convert to 48-bit TIFF format before calibration,
alignment, and summing. The stacked image was then enhanced
using 16-bit masks and adaptive Richardson-Lucy deconvolution.

All processing was done in ImagesPlus 1.68.

http://www.mlunsold.com/examples/D60/D60-M31.html

Have a nice day.

Mike

Paul

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
When you say you bin 2x2, I assume you mean a size reduction to half on each axis. That just averages the four pixels to get a single value for the new pixel. I have been thinking about writing a little program to actually take each channel and sum the pixels in to seperate FITS format files that would actually allow you to see the brightnes increase you get when you bin a normal CCD chip. If you know something that actually does this, I would love to hear about it.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

In the case of the M31 image I did do a 2x2 average bin because the summed image was already bright and I only
wanted to smooth the image by averaging. The 23 images
were summed in to a 64-bit buffer then scaled to fit a 16
bit buffer.

I recently added a Bin function to ImagesPlus that does
2x2,3x3,4x4,and 5x5 sum, average, and median binning of
color or FITS images. The binned image can be saved as a
JPEG, BMP, 8/16 bit TIFF or 16/32/64 int or float FITS
file. Color files can be LRGB, LCMY, and HSL split and
saved as FITS.


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I have to be honest, I am using the small fine JPEG resolution more often now. My poor little 550Mhz machine with 256Megs of RAM just doesn't like playing with the big files in MaximDL. Photoshop is ok, but MaximDL gets really slow and spends all night swapping to the disk to get the job done on the big ones. Also, I am still using Photoshop 4 and it doesn't do the 16-bit per channel images correctly.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

The jpeg format is only 8-bits, Canon's raw format is 12-bits but you need to convert it to 16 bit per color TIFF to
keep the precision saved in your raws. The batch mode calibrate, align(translate, scale, rotate), and combine methods in ImagesPlus 1.68 are very fast and easy to use.
I took me about 10 minutes to calibrate, align, and combine
the 23 3072x2048 tiffs on a 1500mhz with 512 ram. IP also works very well on my 400Mhz with 128 ram and would take about 25 minutes to process. ImagesPlus uses 16-bit per
color minimum with computations done in 64-bit double
buffers. Next month 16-bit mask operations will be available.

Mike

I would check out the Sigma SD9 and wait till the Canon 1DS
is released this winter. Some used D60s will appear on Ebay
when their owners upgrade to the 1DS.

Mike

Hi

The following image was taken a few weeks ago using
a Canon D60 and TV102 at F6.9. Image details are include
in the caption under the image.

http://www.mlunsold.com/examples/D60/D60-M27Wide.html

Have a nice day.

Mike

Hi

The following image is the sum of 11 ISO 400 exposures
each 3 minutes in length. The raw images were dark
calibrated before alignment and summing. Image detail
is available in the caption under the image.

http://www.mlunsold.com/examples/D60/D60-M45.html

Mike

Hi

The following image is the sum of 11 ISO 400 exposures
each 3 minutes in length. The raw images were dark
calibrated before alignment and summing. Image detail
is available in the caption under the image.

http://www.mlunsold.com/examples/D60/D60-M45.html

Mike

(I think astormart might be dropping posts - sorry if this
appears twice)

They both look very good for first attempts Chad. The
color does look too saturated and maybe a little to
much sharpening.

Mike

They both look very good for first attempts Chad. The
color does look too saturated and maybe a little to
much sharpening.

Mike

Hi

The following image could use another hour or so exposure
but still did not turn out to bad. Image details are vailable in the caption under the image.

http://www.mlunsold.com/examples/D60/D60-M33.html

Mike

Hi

The following image was processed from 24 Canon 12-bit raw
images that were converted to 48-bit TIFF before any
processing. Image details are available in the caption under the image.

http://www.mlunsold.com/examples/D60/D60-NGC891.html


Have a nice day.

Mike