Image Processing Seminars – AstroCATS 2014

I will be appearing at the AstroCATS 2014 show in Hamilton, Ontario, May 3rd and 4th.  I’ll be presenting an introductory seminar on May 3 followed by a more advanced workshop on May 4.  Descriptions are below.  Hope to see you there!

Image Processing Part 1 of 2 – Introduction to Image Processing (1hr):

You’ve spent a long, cold night under the sky with your scope and camera.  You have calibrated, aligned and combined the sub-frames.  Now you have a colour (or “RGB”) image that looks almost completely black, other than a few bright dots.  Did something go wrong?  Probably not! 

With just a few basic processing steps you can “make the magic happen” and reveal the hidden treasures in your image: Crop away edge artifacts, correct light pollution gradients (both brightness and colour), balance the colour, “stretch” the data to reveal faint stars and structures, adjust brightness and saturation.

Software like PixInsight, ImagesPlus, MaximDL and Photoshop all contain powerful image processing tools, and each can give great results.  In this seminar, the above steps will be demonstrated using PixInsight and the author’s own image data.

Image Processing Part 2 of 2 – Intermediate/Advanced Image Processing (2 hr):

Only a few basic image processing steps are needed to produce beautiful astronomical images, but the addition of a few extra processing steps can achieve even better results.  This workshop expands upon on the basic work flow covered in “INTRODUCTION TO IMAGE PROCESSING.”   Additional processing tools will be used to bring out detail (with deconvolution and unsharp mask), reveal hidden structures (using wavelets and local histogram equalization), suppress image noise (using separate tools for colour and brightness), and shrink bright stars (using morphological transformation). 

What does all this “jargon” mean? A variety of software tools feature powerful routines such as “deconvolution, wavelets, local histogram equalization, morphological transformation, etc.”. Ron will demystify the jargon and show you what they mean, and when you will want to use them  

The presentation will demonstrate how masks can be used to protect parts of the image, for example stars or background areas, during processing.  While PixInsight will be used in this seminar, similar techniques can be applied using tools available in other software, like Photoshop, ImagesPlus and MaximDL.

 

For more information about AstroCATS and tickets visit the website here.