AIC 2012 has wrapped up. A very fine conference this year with a lot of great content and many good times talking about imaging and astronomy. The day finished with great door prizes, which was fun even if I didn’t win one. There were also two excellent presentations.

John Smith presented How get The Most from your Imaging System. It is all about noise. As little as possible, that is. Noise comes from read noise, sky glow noise, dark noise, and signal noise. Measure your noise in electrons (convert backward from your camera’s gain and an image’s ADU). Noise is the square root of the electron signal. For most imaging, you want to drown the read noise with sky glow noise. CCDWare has a calculator for subexposure length to find the optimal length.

Dithering — moving the camera by a couple of pixels between subexposures — is critical. John recommends a fixed rather than a random dither pattern to ensure no two exposures are in the same place. With good dithering, John believes one might be able to image without using darks!

On your set-up, automation produces more consistent results because your set-up is stable. Make sure your cables are well managed. John likes to put all power distribution and communication on the scope, with only 12 volt and a single USB cable coming down off of the mount. Be creative in how you attach items to the mount. Always use professional grade hubs and serial to USB adapters.

The final presentation was from Alan Erickson, a lead engineer on Photoshop, discussing Image Processing. He presented many tips and tricks with Photoshop which are too detailed to present here. I’ll be looking forward to getting a copy of his presentation. Again I saw how deep Photoshop is as a tool.

Many thanks to Ken Crawford and the whole team that put together yet another amazing conference!