Meade AUTOSTAR Instruction Manual

Meade Autostar

Image Processing

For Windows

Version 3.12

9 January 2004

This document and the Meade Autostar IP software described herein, are copyrighted and are protected from reproduction, proliferation, and disclosure under the Copyright laws of the United States of America.

Information in this document is subject to change without notice and does not represent a commitment on the part of Meade Instruments Corporation. The software and/or databases described in this document are furnished under a license agreement or nondisclosure agreement. The software and/or databases may be used or copied only in accordance with the terms of the agreement. It is against the law to copy the software on any medium except as specifically allowed in the license or nondisclosure agreement. The purchaser may make one copy of the software for backup purposes. No part of this manual and/or databases may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means; electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval systems, for any purpose other that the purchaser's personal use, without the express written permission of Meade Instruments Corporation.

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Hewlett-Packard and LaserJet are registered trademarks of the Hewlett-Packard Company.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Images have been provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Meade Instruments Corporation, Santa Barbara Instrument Group, Astrolink, Inc., SSC Observatories and other private sources.

LIMITED WARRANTY

LIMITED WARRANTY. Meade Instruments warrants that (a) the SOFTWARE will perform substantially in accordance with the accompanying written materials for a period of ninety (90) days from the date of receipt, and (b) any hardware accompanying the SOFTWARE will be free from defects in materials and workmanship under normal use and service for a period of one (1) year from the date of receipt. Any implied warranties on the SOFTWARE and hardware are limited to ninety (90) days and one (1) year respectively. Some states/countries do not allow limitations on duration of an implied warranty, so the above limitation may not apply to you.

CUSTOMER REMEDIES. Meade Instruments and its suppliers' entire liability and your exclusive remedy shall be, at Meade 's option, either (a) repair or (b) replacement of the SOFTW ARE or hardware that does not meet Meade 's Limited Warranty and which is returned to Meade Instruments with a copy of your receipt. This Limited Warranty is void if failure of the SOFTWARE or hardware has resulted from accident, abuse, or misapplication. Any replacement SOFTWARE or hardware will be warranted for the remainder of the original warranty period or thirty (30) days, whichever is longer.

Outside of the United States, these remedies are not available without proof of purchase from an authorized non-U.S. source.

NO OTHER WARRANTIES. Meade Instruments and its suppliers disclaim all other warranties, either expressed or implied, including, but not limited to, implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose, with regard to the SOFTWARE, the accompanying written materials, and any accompanying hardware. This limited warranty gives you specific legal rights. You may have other rights which vary from state/country to state/country.

NO LIABILITY FOR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES. In no event shall Meade Instruments, or its suppliers, be liable for any damages whatsoever (including without limitation, damages for loss of business profits, business interruption, loss of business information, or any other pecuniary loss) arising out of the use of, or inability to use, the Meade product, even if Meade Instruments has been advised of the possibility of such damages. Because some states/countries do not allow the exclusion or limitation of liability for consequential or incidental damages, the above limitation may not apply to you.

U.S. GOVERNMENT RESTRICTED RIGHTS

The SOFTWARE and documentation are provided with RESTRICTED RIGHTS. Use, duplication, or disclosure by the Government is subject to restriction as set forth in subparagraph (c)(1)(ii) of The Rights in Technical Data and Computer Software clause at DFARS 252.227-7013 or subparagraphs (c)(1) and (2) of the Commercial Computer Software--Restricted Rights at 48 CFR 52.227-19, as applicable. Manufacturer is Meade Instruments Corporation, 16542 Millikan Avenue, Irvine, California 92714.

Autostar IP Contents

Introduction ......................................................................................................................................................... 7

A Note on Accuracy ....................................................................................................................................................... 7

System Requirements................................................................................................................................................... 7

Registering the Program .............................................................................................................................................. 7

1. Installation..................................................................................................................................................... 8

2. Features ........................................................................................................................................................... 9

Tool Bar ................................................................................................................................................................ 9

3. File................................................................................................................................................................. 10

Open................................................................................................................................................................................. 10

8 Bit versus 12 or 16 Bit or Floating Point Grayscale Images................................................................................................. 11

Close ................................................................................................................................................................................12

Save As Fits Image ..................................................................................................................................................... 13

Export Display As......................................................................................................................................................... 13

Print.................................................................................................................................................................................. 13

Printer Setup.................................................................................................................................................................. 13

Page Setup .....................................................................................................................................................................14

Exit.................................................................................................................................................................................... 14

4.View .................................................................................................................................................................. 15

Zoom Image Size .......................................................................................................................................................... 15

Scale ................................................................................................................................................................................15

Palettes............................................................................................................................................................................17

Contour ...........................................................................................................................................................................18

Error! Objects cannot be created from editing field codes. ..................................................................................... 18

Blink ................................................................................................................................................................................. 18

5.Tools ................................................................................................................................................................ 19

Coordinates.................................................................................................................................................................... 19

Histogram .......................................................................................................................................................................19

Magnifier......................................................................................................................................................................... 19

Information..................................................................................................................................................................... 20

6.Process............................................................................................................................................................ 21

Undo................................................................................................................................................................................. 21

Calibrate.......................................................................................................................................................................... 21

Merge ...............................................................................................................................................................................21

Correct Column Defect ...............................................................................................................................................21

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Autostar IP Contents

Flip Image....................................................................................................................................................................... 21

Rotate Image.................................................................................................................................................................. 21

Resample ........................................................................................................................................................................22

Convolution Filters ......................................................................................................................................................22

Unsharp masking ......................................................................................................................................................... 23

Median Filter.................................................................................................................................................................. 23

Fix Hot Pixels................................................................................................................................................................. 23

Fix Cold Pixels ..............................................................................................................................................................23

Add Noise ......................................................................................................................................................................... 24

Stretch Image................................................................................................................................................................... 24

RGB Merge ..................................................................................................................................................................... 25

7. Image Utilities ......................................................................................................................................... 27

Set Reference Magnitude ........................................................................................................................................... 28

Image Statistics ............................................................................................................................................................30

Draw Profile ................................................................................................................................................................... 30

List Pixel Values ........................................................................................................................................................... 31

Edit Log File................................................................................................................................................................... 32

8. Group Operations.......................................................................................................................................... 33

Group Edit ....................................................................................................................................................................... 33

Copy.................................................................................................................................................................................. 34

Examine............................................................................................................................................................................ 34

Delete ................................................................................................................................................................................34

Calibrate........................................................................................................................................................................... 34

Align.................................................................................................................................................................................. 34

Combine ...........................................................................................................................................................................35

Filter ................................................................................................................................................................................. 35

Normalize .........................................................................................................................................................................35

Fix Column Defect........................................................................................................................................................... 35

Photometry....................................................................................................................................................................... 35

9. Options........................................................................................................................................................... 37

Night Vision.................................................................................................................................................................... 37

Preferences ....................................................................................................................................................................37

Grayscale Palette and Standard Palette................................................................................................................. 38

Appendix A ........................................................................................................................................................ 39

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Autostar IP Contents

Image Processing Basics........................................................................................................................................... 39

Bibliography ...................................................................................................................................................... 41

Glossary ............................................................................................................................................................. 42

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Introduction

Welcome to Meade Autostar IP astronomical image processing software. Now you can perform many of the same image processing tasks that a professional astronomer would do on a large institutional computer. With Meade Autostar IP you can:

• Enhance high resolution images using advanced image processing techniques.

• Determine stellar magnitudes directly from electronic images, and a number of other powerful

features.

A Note on Accuracy

Meade Autostar IP was designed to be extremely powerful and accurate. Many programs designed for the PC have taken shortcuts to appear faster, but at the expense of accuracy! Not Meade Autostar IP! By carefully coding each section of the program using 64 bit floating point numbers, Meade Autostar IP takes full advantage of your computer to provide fast and accurate performance. This gives you the power and accuracy that rivals main-frame computer performance.

System Requirements

The minimum system required to run Meade Autostar IP are as follows:

• 64 MB RAM.

• Hard Disk with 20 Megabytes of free space.

• An VGA or better adapter and compatible monitor.

• Microsoft Windows 98SE or above.

• A Microsoft compatible mouse.

Autostar IP

Registering the Program

Please take the time to fill out and mail the Registration Card you received with Meade Autostar IP. Registering Meade Autostar IP entitles you to the following additional benefits:

• Meade 's technical support, if you have difficulty using Meade Autostar IP.

• Automatic notification of upgrades or revisions to Meade Autostar IP.

• Automatic notification when new images or data become available.

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1. Installation

Autostar IP is installed as part of Meade’s Autostar Suite. If you have not yet installed the Suite, consult the quickstart instructions for the complete instructions.

Typcially, when the Autostar Suite CD ROM is inserted in your computer it will automatically begin the install process. If your system has “autoplay” disabled, click on START, then click on RUN. When the run dialog box appears, type

A:SETUP then press Enter.

The Setup program will prompt you for the desired drive and path in which to install the program and data files. Then it will begin uncompressing the files from the distribution disks and copying them to the appropriate locations on the Hard disk. Make sure you have at least 60 Megabytes of free space on the destination drive.

Once the installation is complete, Meade Autostar IP will be ready to help you begin processing your own images.

Autostar IP

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2. Features

Tool Bar

Autostar IP's Tool Bar gives you immediate access to image files to perform complex image processing with the click of a button.

Status Bar

Autostar IP's "live" Status Bar constantly updates the coordinate display of the image, and the pixel value (Dn.) of the image, as well as the local time. The Status Bar can also be customized under the Preferences command under the File menu.

Menu Bar

Autostar IP

The familiar W indows Menu Bar gives you access to every function of Autostar IP. To access a drop down menu file, either click with the mouse or press Alt and the letter underlined from the keyboard.

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3. File

Open

Autostar IP

The file menu contains a number of commands for opening and closing image files, and printing images.

The Open command from the File menu or the button of the Tool Bar allows you open either images or spectrographs in any of the following formats:

TIFF - Tagged Image File Format (16bit grayscale) FITS - Flexible Information Transport System (8 or 16 bit or floating point grayscale) BMP - Windows Bitmap Format (8 bit grayscale, 256 color, or 24 bit color) LNX - Spectra Source Lynxx format (12 bit grayscale) ST7 - Santa Barbara Instrument Group (16 bit grayscale) ST6 - Santa Barbara Instrument Group (16 bit grayscale) ST4 - Santa Barbara Instrument Group (8 bit grayscale) 08B - Raw (8 bit grayscale). Similar to ST4.

In addition there is a RAW format for reading unknown image formats.

Images may only be saved in TIFF, FITS or BMP formats.

To open a file:

- Select the desired format.

- Select the directory and filename from the list boxes OR

- Enter the desired filename in the edit box.

If the filename is specified without an extension, a default extension will be automatically added to the filename to reflect the current format. If the extension is provided, it will over-ride the current selection

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Autostar IP

Regardless of the file type, the image data will be converted to 16 bit integer data. This assures that high precession is maintained throughout image processing.

If the image is an RGB color image, you will be prompted as to which color plane you wish to load. The following dialog will appear:

If you select Load As Color Image, the program will load all three color planes and display the image. As an astronomical image processing program, Autostar IP is designed primarily to work on gray scale images. Some of the more advance processing features will not be available when a color image is loaded. If you wish to apply these more sophisticated techniques, load each plane individually, process it and save it in a temporary file. These can later be combined back together to form the desired color image.

8 Bit versus 12 or 16 Bit or Floating Point Grayscale Images

When 12 or 16 bit or Floating point images are loaded, they need to be scaled down to 8 bits (256 gray levels) for display, which is the maximum number of simultaneous gray shades that Windows can display at one time. All of the image information is loaded an processed by the program, but it needs to be scaled down to 256 gray levels for presentation. This scaling is called Prescaling. By default the program is options are set to automatically prescale image data. At anytime you can manually prescale the data to suite your taste.

If you elected to disable automatic prescaling, the program displays the Image Prescale dialog box when an image is loaded that allows manual setting of the parameters used to compress the data into an 8 bit display format. This dialog box displays the histogram of the raw data in a large graph at the top and, at the bottom, a smaller graph of the resulting data after the display scaling operation.

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Autostar IP

Although the display shows only 256 levels, all of the image data are retained and processed by the program. Whenever you perform a processing step, you are given an opportunity to rescale the display data. The scale command, also allows you to rescale the image any time you desire.

When prescaling an image, a histogram is constructed that shows the distribution of the data contained in the image. Normally the data is distributed in a rather narrow range of values which lends itself to scaling to the 8 bit format. Once the histogram is constructed, the Threshold values of the data is calculated and are used to set the scaling range. This gives a reasonable starting point for scaling most images. The threshold values may be reset at any time by pressing the Threshold button.

Close

Since the data is not evenly distributed, some fine-tuning of the limits is usually needed. This is accomplished by using one of the predefined scaling options or by moving the red markers located under the main histogram display. Generally, the best images are obtained with the markers set just at the high and low edges of the important data. Values that are above the upper marker result in pure white pixels, while those below result in pure black.

If the Std. Dev. button is depressed the Mean and Standard Deviation of the image are calculated. The upper limit is set to the Mean plus 5 Standard Deviations, while the lower limit is set to the Mean minus 1 Standard Deviation.

The Min Max button sets the pointers to the extreme minimum and maximum values contained in the image, while Full Scale sets the values to maximum and minimum values in the image.

If you are loading images from an RGB composite set of files, you may find it useful to use the same scaling values for each of the individual images. This is easily accomplished by using the Use Previous Scale Values button located at the bottom the dialog box. Since many astronomical images contain a large amount of red light, you may want to load the red image first, scale it properly, then use the same scaling values for both the green and blue images.

Selecting Close will close the current file and remove its display window and any support windows, such as the Histogram.

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Save As Fits Image

Displays the Save As dialog box and allows saving the current image data in a floating point FITS formatted file. This method of saving insures that all of the information in the image is maintained. This is the format recommended for keeping archival copies of your image data.

To save a file:

- Select the directory and filename from the list boxes

- Enter the desired filename in the Edit box.

Export Display As

Saves the currently display image to a file. This function is only available if the current format type is TIFF, FITS or BMP. This command will save the image as displayed on your computer as an 8 bit or 24 bit data in the format you request. Saving images this way will allow you to save images ready for use in documents, but will discard part of the original image data

Autostar IP

Revert

Print

To save a file:

- Select the desired format.

- Select the directory and filename from the list boxes OR

- Enter the desired filename in the Edit box.

NOTE: All images are saved in the 8 bit versions of their respective format type, Some original information may be lost.

The Revert command allows you to revert the image to the last saved version.

Selecting the Print command or pressing the Print button from the Tool Bar prints the current image on the system’s default printer. The image is scaled so that it completely fills the printing area of the paper in the horizontal direction. The vertical scale is then chosen to preserve the original aspect ratio of the image. Additional information pertaining to the image is also printed at the bottom of the page, below the image.

Printer Setup

Displays the Printer Setup dialog box which allows the selection of any of the currently installed printers.

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