From: "David Illig" <yag@davidillig.com>

Date: November 9, 2005 8:44:34 PM MST

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: Camera for guiding

Much of what you have said is obviously true, or is your opinion, so I can't quibble with it.

I will point out one small factual error, however -- Adobe CS2, including Photoshop, may

be installed on two computers. The license, as before, permits operation one computer at

a time.

David

Tim:

As a professional, I've used Photoshop since version 1.6. It's a great program, but it's

rather expensive (and nowadays, you can't install it on more than one computer,

whereas

before you just couldn't RUN it on more than one computer at a time).

For home use, particularly on my PC so far, I've downloaded the GIMP (http://

www.gimp.org/), which has many photoshop functions but is free. It's available for Mac

OS X as well, but I've not been able to get it to install on my new Powerbook with 10.4

yet

(get a "needs X11" message, but I can't install that from Apple due to another error I get

but can't recall at the moment).

As far as Registax on the Mac. I've used Registax on my PC with my ToUcam Pro for the

past few years before I saw the note in S&T about Astro IIDC. Since it became available,

I've not taken the ToUcam out of the box, though for the first few months, I had only an

Aplux firewire camera to work with.

I've experimented with processing videos taken with the color Flea camera and

processed

in Astro IIDC, versus Registax 3 (after exporting as AVI files and running Registax via

Virtual PC on my Mac), and I will say that I get much better quality images via Astro IIDC

than I can with Registax. I haven't tried the video software that shipped with the

camera,

though (for PCs), and it is possible that the results might differ that way.

Over all, though, I find Astro IIDC to be more user-friendly and capable than Registax,

I've not felt much of a pull to fall back on Registax since I really got serious with the Flea

and Astro IIDC.

-Tim.