From: "milton_aupperle" <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: June 21, 2012 3:13:22 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Astro IIDC 4.08.01

Hi Folks;

Besides the fix for 4.08.01 for live alignment (which works I'm told by the person affected), I have been working on a few improvements to Astro IIDC for the next x.x.1 release.

1) When choosing a manual selection area, the "red off limits zone" is essentially gone. Now it's just a 4 pixel red edge along the outside of the selection image - regardless of selection area. So if you use larger sizes (i.e. 64x64 to 256x256) then you can move it right up to the edges now. I still have a lot of testing on this to make sure I caught the edge cases for both PowerPC and x86, but it seems pretty solid right now.

2) The Movie to FITs code is about ready for internal testing. My original FITs export frame code is about 8 years old and I basically had to rewrite it due to all the code that Apple has obsoleted - and continues to obsolete as they convert (i.e. dumb down) OS X to iOS. The code will convert each frame in a movie into an 8 or 16 bit (depending on movie depth source) FITs File. If the movie is mono chrome you get a series of Luma FITS files, if it's a color movie, then it creates 3 FITs file for each color frame (i.e. Red, Green and Blue FITS files). For color movies, the exported FITS file will use up at least 3 times bytes of the source movie, so your going to need tonnes of disk space.

3) I'll also be adding in the "Chunk Movie to Ref Movies..." function which will cut up a movie into a series of Reference movies - based on a user specified amount of time. So if you have a 30 second source movie and enter a 5 second "chunk" interval, it will create 6 reference movies from it. Reference movies contain only a reference back to the original movie, so they use up very little disk space. The down side is that if you move or delete source movie, the References will not be able to find the parent and will not be playable / stackable etc.

4) I likely will add an "Invert Image" check box to the Guiding sheet, which will allow you to invert (i.e. black becomes white, white becomes black) the image used for guiding. That's primarily for people whom wish guide off a sunspot while imaging for the day. With "Invert" turned on, the sunspot will become white and the background will be black, and Astro IID can guide  off of or track the sun spot.

And that's about all I was planning on adding for this release.

TTYL..

Milton Aupperle