Posts Made By: Ron Wodaski

Under a minute if you have sufficient memory. It can take longer if your computer is using virtual memory (spooling memory to the disk instead of using RAM).

Ron Wodaski

A wonderful - really deep. Outstanding work across a wide range of brightness levels.

Ron Wodaski

Very nice! Stars are gorgeous and colorul; nebula is realy smooth and we-detailed. Just an excellent effort.

Ron Wodaski

Beautiful first light. These RCs seem to provide really script images.

Ron Wodaski

An excellent image, beautiful.

Ron Wodaski

Looks pretty good, nicely detailed. Core details show up really well.

Ron WOdaski

This is really a beautiful image. The large images show more detail, but smaller images like this have a more natural, less grainy appearance that also has value.

Ron Wodaski

Very effective image, nicely done.

Ron Wodaski

If you have TheSky, this is trivial - just turn on asteroids and get the recent comets.

Online, the resources you are looking for are at the Minor Planet Center web site:

http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/mpc.html

Try the MPC orbit database and the MPChecker.

Ron Wodaski

It's always debatable whether to do more sharpening, but I think this image could handle more sharpening. You'll lose some of the smoothness (which I also value and rarely see in planet images), of course. My attempt at sharpening is attached. I used the following techniques:

* Unsharp mask, with a threshold settings of 2, and radius adjusted ot bring out large-scale features by increasing their contrast. This is useful, because it sharpens without adding much graininess to the image.

* Another unsharp mask, with a radius of 1 (zero caused too much grain) but about half the radius of the first step. The smaller threshold sharpens more features at a small scale, again without hurting the grain very much.

* I used a selection smaller than the entire planet, and feathered about half the distance from the edge of the selection to the edge of the planet. This prevents the worst sort of edge effects from sharpening.

* I increased saturation about about 30%

* I shifted hue just a very small amount (about 7%) toward red to bring out color in the spot and increase contrast in the bands.

Ron Wodaski
The New CCD Astronomy
http://www.newastro.com