From: "Duane" <macastronomer@mac.com>

Date: November 20, 2007 9:48:05 PM MST

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: Imaging Source Abandoning FireWire?

Visually selecting frames will be great! Please make it easy. I've used KIS but I don't like the 

"A," "R" when first opening. I've had it open all, but it loads my screen so full (and is so 

slow) that it is too painful to work through. The representative frame and the quick switch 

with the space bar works pretty well. I ended up not using it and just keep praying for a 

steadier sky.

If Astro IIDC would allow browse of the sharpest frames to find a good representative shot, 

then view 10-20 images at a time, selecting a few that escalate into a final group where I 

could select again (and again) until they are whittled down to the final cut.

It would be cool to see compiling image with the currently selected images, while in the 

process of selecting. Every time an image was included it could possibly show if that frame 

was an improvement or not. Speed shouldn't be an issue as selecting by hand is a slow 

process anyway.

Just some thoughts.

PS. Send some steady skies my way.

--- In Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com, Milton Aupperle <milton@...> wrote:

Hi Duane;

On 19-Nov-07, at 11:15 PM, Duane wrote:

Do you sell a different version of Astro IIDC for microscopy? At  

work we primarily use Zeiss

driven cameras and software for light microscopy but I'm wondering  

what advantage Astro

IIDC could offer. Our electron microscopy is pretty specialized  

(Gatan and AMT).

Same product.

For Microscopy it's primarily medial / biological, however there is  

no reason it can't be used for other things.

The more important things for microscopy are live flat field  

adjustment (Altivec or SSE accelerated), quick and non intrusive  

frame / movie grabs (in Astro IIDC 4 you can also re-name the movies/ 

files you grab afterwards too), automautic settings saved in a text  

file for each file/ movie grabbed, selectable spot color balance,  

ability to balance to a specific color auto exposure and being able  

to change camera settings via a key stroke.

I'll be watching for ver 4. I for one know that you'll drudge  

through it and come out with

an excellent upgrade. You have some competition out there but it  

doesn't come close.

Astro IIDC makes it fun—now if only my sky would make it as fun.

Well it' is supposed to be about collecting images under "hostile"  

environments with minimal screwing around with hardware or software.

The main issue I've run into in porting to MacIntel is that SSE on  

x86 is a bad joke compared to PowerPC Altivec. Not just performance  

which Altivec kicks it butt all over the place, but also because it's  

missing instructions and the work around to solve this kill the  

performance to the point I may as well just write scalar.

For example, a lot of the math I do requires doing calculations and  

converting floating point values to unsigned 16 bit integers for  

images. On Altivec, I convert 8 floats into 8 saturated (ie.  

saturated means properly truncated so that values is in the range 0  

to 65535) unsigned integers in 3 instructions. For scalar this same  

operation works out to being 56 instructions and for SSE, the best  

you can do it in is 32 instructions. If I add in vector load and  

unload time, SSE is only marginally faster than scalar and scalar is  

a lot easier to write and debug. And MMX doesn't do floats so it's  

useless.

Do you think it would be possible to have Astro IIDC judge shape  

while it judges

sharpness? Sometimes there are very sharp images but the shape is  

distorted enough that

stacking causes problems. Size is another issue. Sometimes the  

image bows (or bubbles)

out and sometimes it does the opposite—making the disk change size.  

These things all

together affect the stacked image. I may not explain that well, but  

you've done it enough,

I'm sure you know what I mean. If these could be fixed (unbowed/ 

resized) or tossed out,

my sky wouldn't have to be quite so perfect to glean a good shot.

Your explanation is fine, I call it "boiling images" and it's common  

in poorer seeing.

Shape matching isn't going to be in there and I doubt it fit would  

work any better than the adjustments we have already. Basically the  

matching tolerance setting is what controls what it tolerates for  

matching to different shapes.

One thing you will probably like is that you can now select the  

sharpest frames visually in a frame by frame basis via a list of the  

sharpness values and can also select which frame you feel is the most  

representative for matching.

And after shooting 30 gigabyes of  Lunar video and moving it from the  

LapTop to the G5, I'm off to capture Mars for an hour as I'm sitting  

in a nice steady air spot right now , which the 300 mb NAM weather  

site correctly predicted.

TTYL..

Milton J. Aupperle