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Welcome to New? Jvc video decoder for mac. Don't forget to read the!. User equipment threads:,. Rules. Rule 1: Images must be of real astronomical objects or phenomena only. Terrestrial man-made objects and people are not to be included in the image.
Terrain should be unintrusive and cropped to the best of your ability to avoid excess landscape. Images which violate this rule will be removed at moderator discretion and possibly without warning/explanation. Rule 2: Posts can only be images that you have captured and processed, or discussion about capturing or processing your own images. Rule 3: Links to blogs, articles or external websites should be interesting and promote discussion about astrophotography. Posts of this type that do not encourage discussion will be removed. Rule 4:.Image posts are to link directly to the image, not to landing pages, personal galleries, or professional sites.
Submissions that link to professional photography sites, or gallery/feed based services or pages are not allowed. Rule 5: All submitted images MUST include acquisition AND processing details as a top-level comment. All posts without this information will be given a warning, and if not corrected will be removed. Rule 6: Unless you have done a drastic alteration or reprocessing of a prior submission, you may not repost your edit. Adding data, completely reprocessing, or making changes that have a major effect on the image will qualify it to be reposted as an update. A period of one week must pass before you make any repost of a similar image. Additionally, all 'accolade' type posts (publications/etc) should be contained in a self-post.
Rule 7: All posts must contain the name of the subject in the image. Equipment details and karma-bait titles are not allowed. Posts with these infractions will be subject to the discretion of a moderator for removal. If you are unsure about your title violating this rule, or if automod removed your post, please see or message the moderators for more details.
Rule 8: Since we are an amateur astrophotography subreddit, we'd like all images must be taken with amateur equipment. Therefore, we are no longer allowing images acquired by professional equipment or professional services. Data should be captured using equipment which you own. Posting etiquette: Please follow rediquette to the best of your ability - please keep discussion on topic and treat each other with respect.
Keep general questions in the weekly sticky. Try to keep memes and politics off the sub.
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Got a question? Please check the stickied Weekly Ask-Anything Thread (WAAT). I'm Ivo Jager, author of. AMAA about such things as StarTools, imaging on a budget, my reasons for writing a whole new software suite from scratch, image processing, tips & tricks, writing software in general, algorithms/signal processing and techniques, my thoughts on the AP community, my views on the current Australian dropbear emergency, how many cats, whether I bacon, or if it is really true that once rode a narwhal.
Proof it's me: (just a splash screen change:) Do ask if you want me to elaborate on anything discussed. I'm answering some questions to get things going. Asked; What's your favorite object to image? Moving to the Southern Hemisphere was weird for me from an astronomy point of view. Looking up, the moon all of a sudden was 'upside down' and none of the constellations were where they were supposed to be, with some just completely missing!
What I got back in return though is a wealth of new objects to explore. The absolute highlight for me (and probably anyone on the southern hemisphere) is the and for good reason; it's one of the largest diffuse nebulae visible from earth and is four(!) times as large as our old-time favourite, the Orion Nebula (it is brighter too!).
Not only that, but it has an extremely interesting make up and features. Cherry on top is, the closest and most well studied hyper giant star. It is quite unstable, has been ejecting lots of matter (which can be observed) and is ready to go supernova anywhere between now and the next million years or so. How's that for a target? If you hadn't made StarTools, what software would you be using? Most definitely PixInsight, but then again, PixInsight's shortcomings were one of the major reason for creating StarTools.
What was your worst imaging session experience? Not necessarily worst image, but worst experience. Being on an extreme budget, I was working on my own guider interface.
I had modified the hand controller of my EQ5 mount, made a guidescope out of a $20 second hand department-store newtonian, attached a $7 webcam to it and wrote some barebones code to make the mount move using my laptop. I decided I was going to do a handguided session to see if everything worked. Everything went swimmingly and I was really chuffed, but 3 hours later, inspecting the surely amazing haul of data, a lens in optical train (I was imaging afocally) had dewed over from the 3rd sub onwards. A copious amount of expletives were uttered that night. Asked; Why did you write StarTools? There were a few main reasons; 1.
The rather disappointing state of the available AP software at the time, with user interfaces, signal processing, engine architectures and algorithms firmly stuck in the 90s. I was convinced the huge amount of CPU power and RAM that any reasonably modern computer has these days could be put to better use to yield better results, in a much more user-friendly way, even with data from 'lesser' equipment. I was broke and couldn't afford buying any software, even if I wanted to. I had some very specific issues with my 'gear' stemming from point 2 (e.g.
Sparse equipment, no dark sky site). The only way I knew how to solve them was by writing the software to deal with these issues. AP is for everyone, and I wanted to remedy a certain air of elitism that I felt hung around some communities;. just because you've been doing AP for years, sunk a lot of money into it, or know how to operate a certain piece of software, doesn't mean that your work or opinions are automatically superior or even good.
just because you haven't been doing AP for years, haven't sunk a lot of money into it, or don't know how to operate a certain piece of software, doesn't mean that your work or opinions are automatically inferior or bad. 'just buy a better mount' is not an acceptable answer to a request for help with, for example, rounding stars, nor is suggesting that anyone's efforts are inferior just because people have to make concessions to budget, imaging time, location or otherwise due to their circumstances - some of us have day jobs to take into account, some of us have families to spend quality time with, some of us have limited means, live in rentals, etc. In short, I wanted to do away with the notion that you needed to have been 'paying your dues' to get anywhere in this field.
I wanted to create something that leveled the playing field a little - something that gave newbies a running start (ease of use) and ameliorated the influence of investment into time (learning curve), into gear (software solutions to hardware problems) and up-front money (ST is cheap and not-for-profit - I don't cover development and support costs by a longshot). What's your favorite module in StarTools.the one that makes you go 'Yeah.I nailed it. That does EXACTLY what I hoped.'
When I first got the Tracking-based noise reduction routine to work, I was like 'Holy. It actually friggin works!' I had been working on the idea and algorithms behind it for so long; track per-pixel evolution of noise as you process the image and then use that meta data to drive a 'regular' noise reduction algorithm, also per-pixel (and I'm not talking a simple modulation using a luminance mask).
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Going over it time and again in my head and on paper, I knew it was supposed to work, but I had never read or seen anything like it done before. I was pretty astonished by the result even though it worked as planned - it just 'knew' exactly how much noise grain existed in every location and snuffed it out.
I had similar moments of euphoria and nerdgasm-induced adrenaline rushes when I started feeding the same data to the deconvolution module and (just upgraded) the wavelet sharpening module. Follow-up: Which module still pisses you off? The LRGB module hands-down.
It needs a lot more functionality for compositing. I've attempted 2 rewrites already but I'm still struggling with keeping the darn thing intuitive and user-friendly (smart). Compositing images from different sources in itself is reasonably straight forward if you just lazily clutter the screen with options, settings and a formula editor for any pixel math - whether they are appropriate or not. But that's just not the StarTools way.
We must know about the cats Chippy (Age 6, full name 'Chippy Mayo' - after my favourite food; hot chips with mayonnaise) is a grey cross persian we got from the shelter. Looking at his siblings, Chippy was clearly the runt of the litter (a fair bit smaller). If you hadn't gathered by now I tend to root for the underdog/cat.:) He sealed the deal when he threw up in front of us - he's still pretty good at that.
Getty (Age 1, full name 'Giulietta' - after the ) is the Tortoiseshell, also from the the shelter. She was a lone, very young kitten, found wandering the street alone before she was brought to the shelter. She picked us - she went mental when we tried to move on and look at the older kittens.
She demanded to be taken home. It's all a bit of a blur from there. We weren't prepared for her kitten mind tricks ('This is the kitten you are looking for'). Next thing I remember I was sitting in the car with a cartboard box and a mewing kitten, clawing at the gear stick. We decided that she therefore must like Alfa Romeos, so we named her after the venerable Giulietta models. After only a week or so Chippy took to her and they are now BFFs. Asked; What equipment do you normally use?
The short answer is 'other people's'. After years of living in different places and countries - sometimes living out a backpack - we've finally settled down a few months ago and bought a place. Lugging around a scope (let alone a permanent setup) was never possible until now. Right now, I got a banged up 8' dob and an EQ5 mount, plus a bunch of different half-working shoe-string-budget imaging solutions, just to get me. The weather is still terrible here in Oz and it's currently not safe at night with the dropbear situation and all, but I'm hoping to build a modest observatory some time in the next few years.
For the development of StarTools, I actually enjoy working with a huge variety of different data sources - StarTools has to cater for all sorts of situations and sources, from dobs with webcams to Hubble data and everything in between. So it's a fun and very necessary way of sanity checking the algorithms. What is one thing that you feel like most people in this community just aren't aware of, but would be helpful if they knew? Can I pick two things? A very quick and simple one - only process at the resolution that shows true 1:1 detail. A high resolution DSLR is not going to do anything for you if atmospheric conditions (or your scope) won't let you resolve detail at that high resolution.
And here is another one; You can get great images with even the simplest gear by just getting to the bottom of two things; 1. Why does my image/data look like it does, 2. What should my finished image ideally look like. Addressing #1 will help you get to know your gear and the unique challenges that your gear and circumstances pose. Once you completely understand how your gear and circumstances make #2 look like #1, you will fundamentally understand each and every challenge that you need to tackle, i.e. Undoing or mitigating the individual things that make #2 look like #1. These things will be unique for everyone.
Understand them though and all of a sudden image processing will become a 'zen' like experience - I promise! The goal here is to take the guesswork out of it all. All of a sudden you're free to get directly hands-on with your artistic interpretation and vision for the image. So, try to understand all the possible sources that generate photons that make it to the wells of your CCD. Try to understand how these sources are distorted themselves (ex.
Atmospheric turbulence). Try to understand how the photons arrive at the aperture of your scope, how they are diffracted, how they are focused, what sort of aberrations your optical system exhibits, how you've tried to remedy these aberrations, how you're filtering any photons. I read through most of what you posted and have to say, I don't know what's left?
You answered a LOT of questions there! As a very long time photoshop user, I've never heartily embraced a strictly astrophotographic processing tool. I think, by concentrating on getting the best raw data as I can, intensive processing becomes unnecessary. Based on this, and on the examples I've submitted to this sub over the past year, do you think that there is an advantage for me to use ST over PS? If so, what would that advantage be? Thanks for doing the AMA, hope I'm not too late.
I think, by concentrating on getting the best raw data as I can, intensive processing becomes unnecessary. That is so very true. Less is more, and that's why I believe processing of reasonably good data should not take more than a few minutes at most. Every filter or module should be visited only once, and only if needed (ST enforces this for many steps by default).
Based on this, and on the examples I've submitted to this sub over the past year, do you think that there is an advantage for me to use ST over PS? If so, what would that advantage be? There are 3 main reasons why I would still recommend a dedicated AP package like StarTools or PixInsight over something generic like Photoshop.
Noise is the bane of the astrophotographer's existence. We work with high noise, low signal data. AP packages have this in mind every step of the way (ST more than any other with its continuous noise Tracking as you process).
PS' noise reduction routines (and the many plug-ins available) are mainly geared towards noise in terrestrial images, often with filters that tend to enhance man made or organic scenes. This is great for those sort of scenes, but 'sees' detail that isn't there in AP scenes. Geometrical shapes and sharp corners in AP are very, very rare. You're mostly working with diffuse gas clouds on the one hand and overexposed point lights (stars) on the other with very little in between.
This makes certain noise reduction algorithms more effective (ex. Scale based noise reduction) while causing others (e.g. Terrestrial ones) to introduce artifacts. We often deal with dynamic range problems in AP.
Things are either ridiculously bright or ridiculously faint with little in between. Packages such as PI or ST come with many dedicated tools to let you manipulate and mitigate these extremes on a local level, letting you tease out much more detail. For some data, precision is key and working in linear space is an absolute necessity for many algorithms to do their job most efficiently (for example color calibration, gradient/lp removal and deconvolution). While this can be done in PS, it's not trivial (and precision is not guaranteed for all filters afaik). The sequence with which filters or transformations are applied matter as well! To a certain extent this is still a problem in PI, but at least they have a clear distinction between linear and non-linear data in the documentation and tutorials.
(ST removes the worry about sequence and linear and non-linear data completely by going back and forth in history as needed). You produce some great images and it's clear you've overcome a fair amount of the limitations of PS for astro work, but for someone starting anew PS is really not the way to go in this day and age - you'd be missing out on a lot of functionality and tools that many APers take for granted these days! That said, happy to have a play and demonstrate ST to you with any data you can provide! I'm pretty confident ST could tease out more detail while keeping noise under control much better.:). I was born in the Netherlands, the most light polluted country in the world.
I loved everything astronomy, but was never really able to do much with it. It's only now that I'm in Australia that I have been able to really get into practicing it myself. When it comes to computer programming I'm self taught.
I've been coding since age 8 (which I guess these days isn't that special anymore). I've done a lot of stuff on mobile devices, worked at Palm for a couple of years and did some contracting work around Europe. I have a love for graphics programming and (virtual) sound synthesis. Starting on StarTools, I found that image processing was a lot like a lot like sound processing, just with an added dimension. Almost every image processing algorithm has a sound equivalent and vice versa. Having that sort of background made me kind of artificially synaesthetic (apart from 'suffering' from mild synaesthesia anyway); I can almost 'hear' images and 'see' sounds at the same time, which is really useful when you're trying to figure out what's wrong with an image (or algorithm), or one version of an image is less pleasing than another version, or coming up with some outlandish new algorithms or methods.
Other than that I hold an MSc in Communication Science and just set up a new Digital Media company with my girlfriend and a friend.