From: Jim Chung <jim_chung@sunshine.net>

Date: March 24, 2009 10:15:08 AM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Astro IIDC 4.03.00 available

I second the thanks to Milton for his continued refinement.

Quoting Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>:

Hi Folks;

I just posted the Astro IIDC 4.03.00 dmg.

http://www.outcastsoft.com/Astro_IIDC_Installer40300.dmg

The main web site is not updated and 4.02.00 is still the "official" release version until likely friday.

Please try it out and get back to me soonest if there are any issues, especially on x86. I would like to release it on Friday March 27, assuming no issues show up.

The main changes include (form the Read Me First.rtfd" document.

-In the "Others" folder of the dmg installer are three Apple scripts named "Example All Commands Script", "RecordMultipleFrames Script" and "RecordMultipleMovies Script". The RecordMultipleMovies and RecordMultipleFrames can record multiple movies and frames over a time period automatically. You can customize them by changing the time durations.

- Fixed a bug where nudging a Selection area with up/down/left/right arrow keys does not recalculate and update the Pixel Variance value.

- Fixed a bug where clicking on a the 128th or higher selection area would not find the object (unsigned char overflow).

- The per frame pixel comparison code now checks to see how many equal minimum areas it finds. If it find more than 2 that match up but have different locations, it will report this selection as unmatched and not add this image to the stack. This should eliminate false positives when stacking frames.

- Added Checkbox named "Histogram expand brightness of all frames used for pixel alignment." to the Stacking Options window. What this does is apply a histogram stretch (use 0.5% low and 99.5% on the high end) to the frame used for alignment, which increases the brightness and contrast. This was specifically designed for cases where you have to under exposes the movie or you need to use the darker portions of the movie for finding good alignment features. It mainly should be used when trying to do MAP alignment for lunar terminator type images, as it will cause brightly lit areas to brighten up significantly. The effect this has will only be displayed when selecting pixel alignment areas.

- When importing L R G B image alignments in Astro IIDC, I found that usually one or more of the RGB channels are excessively dark. So we added an automatic Histogram stretch (0.5% low 99.5% High) to each of the imported channels to programatically brighten things up. This will make aligning dark images work a lot easier.

- Added the pop up menu "Dont' blend in a stack if # of frames drops below xxx of expected." to the stacking options. The pop up menu runs from 40% to 95% in 5% increments. If the number of frames that Astro IIDC uses when creating a stack drops below a certain number of frames, then Astro IIDC will not add this stack into the blended MAP image. For example let's say you use a selection of 80% and have picked 150 frames for stacking, so the minimum number of stack frames is 120. If Astro IIDC creates a stack that only has 100 matchable frames then this stack will not be included in the resulted MAP image because it falls below our acceptable cut off limit of 120. If the stack has 120 frames or higher it will be added in, but not otherwise. This is designed to prevent those situations where noise or turbulence causes a poor matching of a selection area, and when these low stack frame stacks are sharpened, you can easily pick it out from the background.

- Added checkbox "Do not create individual Stack images, just the blended MAP image." which prevents the intermediate stack frames from being saved to disk. Note that this can result in no frames being stacked at all, especially if you have a high percentage for the  "Dont' blend in a stack if # of frames drops below xxx of expected"

- Changed most text file output so that we use Tab separator instead of commas, so that importing into spreadsheets is easier.

Have a great week..

Milton Aupperle