AIC 2010 day two is about to start. I’ll see if I’m able to live blog the event through the WordPress iPad app.
Update 10:15am PDT
Excellent morning sessions so far. Russ Croman received the Hubble award and went through a processing example. The key points I took away: The darker your sky, the longer your exposure time. A dark location challenges you to go very long to really get depth in the image. He also discards one half to two thirds of his data, keeping only the best frames.
Rogelio Bernal Andreo gave an excellent talk on wide field processing in PixInsight. It was good to hear about something besides Photoshop. He emphasized the need ton make the basic steps on an image (e.g., gradient removal) on the linear image. He also made great use of wavelets to do multi-scale processing. For example, retaining layers 1 and 2 to only capture the small stars.
Update 1:00pm PDT
Todd Klaus of NASA’s Kepler mission gave a great presentation on the instruments and data gathering process of this planet-finding mission. The data calibration process is really impressive as they pull multiple layers of noise away from the data.
A fine lunch followed.
Update 4:39pm PDT
Quick update on the afternoon. Good information from the Founders Presentation. Adam Block has a great new 32 inch telescope on Mt. Lemon. The Mt. Lemon Sky Center has to be on the visit list as soon as I can make it. We got the full story of the making of the new Hubble 3D movie.
Kevin Nelson of QSI gave a good presentation on FFT transformations. But he started with a forecast on CCDs. We are getting to the limit on size of chip since that drives all other factors — scope, mount, camera size, filter, etc. Look for smaller pixels. On FFT, a way to look at the frequency of items in an image, similar in concept to wavelets. A powerful image analysis and processing tool.
Just getting a nice overview of work from Michael Joiner of BYU. He runs the West Mountain Observatory that sits near Utah Lake.
Bob Fera coming up now.
Update 5:00pm PDT
Bob’s key points: Don’t clip your blacks, protect stars when sharpening, and try out eXcalibrator a G2V calculator.
Finally, John Smith of CCDSoft on the Alsubai Project, an automated exoplanet search. Very cool project using off the shelf components. A 40 degree square coverage. 10 class A candidates for exoplanets. Wow.
All for today!