From: "Terrence R. Redding" <tredding@mac.com>

Date: March 26, 2011 11:15:42 PM MDT

To: "Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com" <Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com>

Cc: "Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com" <Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com>

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Astro IIDC 4.06.06 Beta starting next week

Milton,

Excellent. I am very interested in the new batch photometry feature.

Terrence R. Redding, Ph.D.

Director, Global Learn Day

http:olt.net/gld

On Mar 26, 2011, at 10:50 PM, milton_aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com> wrote:

Hi Folks;

In case your wondering what I have been doing with Astro IIDC the last while, I have almost finished porting all of the PowerPC Altivec code to x86 SSE.

So you can expect a 200 to 600% performance increase for the Image Processing code on x86 Macs. For PowerPC users, there will be a 100% speed increase on rendering time because I eliminated a couple of scalar bottleneck routines with Altivec versions.

I also reworked a bunch of code for stacking and added some SSE3 code for calculating centroids, so you can expect a 10 to 15% speed improvement there too, for both PowerPC and x86.

Also, I wrote SSE code for Live Flat Frame operation for both 8 and 16 bit, so that will run about 300% faster too.

The only new feature is a batch photometry option, which can calculate the magnitude of all the stars in an image automatically. You just set an interactive cutoff parameter to separate stars from background, and it locates all the stars at a click of a button.

There a bunch of little enhancements too, which will be covered in the Read Me notes.

So we should have a beta release later next week.

TTYL.

Milton Aupperle