Photographic Star Atlas??

The again, as a colleague of mine used to say, never underestimate the bandwidth of a car load of CD's. !

LMAO .... must remember that one!

I think that as a project, there will be different requirements at different stages.

The 'final product' could be made available in any number of formats - printed, on CD, on-line. Or it could be made available in all these formats, depending on cost (in terms of all resources - time, money, materials).

However, during the creation of the images, there will no doubt be a fair amount of file sending going on. That stage might be best achieved by email between image takers/processors rather than posting via this website.

I think there needs to be some sort of plan put together that addresses the who, where, when, why etc and that someone should co-ordinate the effort.

So - does anyone want to take this co-ordination role?

Cheers
Dave McD

Just a few thought for guidelines regarding image sizes....

Firstly, what sort of detail are you looking at? If you are going to catch very low mag stars, you'll need quite a few pixels to bring out the detail- but here's some ideas...

For web: I'd suggest you use gifs if the images are greyscale, as most of the compression that a gif uses is based on the amount of colour in the image. Can be more precise about specs for gifs if people are interested...
If the images are colour, jpeg is the only way to go. I'd also suggest that the physical dimensions of the image don't exceed 750 X 450 pixels- this is a usability issue. You should cater for those folks with the minimum spec monitors- 800X600- the size is slightly smaller than that to allow for browser buttons etc. This allows the user to view the image without using scroll bars. Alternatively we could build a web application that would allow people to easily navigate the catalog and the images. There's a Flash program I use called zoomify that allows me to publish, stream and navigate exremely large images. demo here: www.time2.ie/zoom1.swf
I'd be up for helping out.

Print This is where file sizes get a little crazy... for detailed pics you'd want about 300dpi resolution, for less detailed I'd reccommend about 150- but nothing below that. They should be saved as tiffs as this is a lossless format.

Thats my thoughts on the subject,
cheers,

Dave Power

I'm sure Bart will be thrilled to see 500k-2M files on this site :lol:
Seriously though, we're all these going to be located?
When I send pics for the SAC site, I try and keep all images below 100k, even though most of them are from the canon and were originally many megs in size.

we're all these going to be located?

As a thought, some people here host their own servers (Dave Power, John Honan, semi-me... others?). Is there room for extra bandwidth on these servers to host a specific file/folder/section of the photography? At least for the duration of the work-in-progress... after everything is finished, you can all have your normal bandwidths back again!

I have no problem using my site. I get 1.5 gig bandwidth per month...

Cheers

Dave McD