What went wrong here?

Apart from the obvious - ou of focus and poor exposure, in my defense I was rushing to use the new laptop between dense clouds - any one know what went wrong with these pics? They are covered in dots, and if you change the contrast on them you can see the dots form like map contours. They weren't like that during the session on the laptop screen. They were pretty clear. Now, during my rushing and panicking to get the pics, I inadvertantly set it to GIF instead of FITS. Would that be the reason? I only just managed to get those two shots plus another of the moon which was extremely out of focus, before I became clouded out altogether.
Something tells me this might be due to condensation on the chips, there was definately none on the scope, I kept a check on that.

www.irishastronomy.org/user_resources/fi...1111537271-MOON2.JPG

www.irishastronomy.org/user_resources/fi...1537309-Jupiter1.JPG

Bill H.

Hi Bill - definately a result of using the GIF format. Use FITS and then process the image - then save the image as a JPG to post here. Definately not condensation on the chip either - your scope would dew first and you'd definately notice that!

These are nice images - dots excepted - nice focus and good exposure. If you had these saved as FITS or JPG, you'd be onto a winner!

By the way, does your processing software support FITS? Some do, some don't. Even AutosStar image processing seems to have trouble with my FITS images... I stick to JPG, for now...

Well done! I really think you've cracked the DSI. Keep going :!:

Cheers

Dave McD

.Now, during my rushing and panicking to get the pics, I inadvertantly set it to GIF instead of FITS. Would that be the reason?

Yep, gif only has a fixed palette of colours and when there are not enough colours in the palette it will dither the image newspaper style. Saving in FITS I imagine will solve this problem.

Cheers,
~Al

Thanks Dave and Al. Must pay more attention. I had one eye on the laptop, one eye on the scope and another eye on the clouds - pretty clever eh - and between putting on my specs and taking them off constantly and trying to beat the clouds, I got that bit wrong.

By the way, does your processing software support FITS? Some do, some don't. Even AutosStar image processing seems to have trouble with my FITS images... I stick to JPG, for now...

Dave McD

strange thing is Dave, the DSI instructions say to save the pics as JPeg, which you can do, but then the Autostar software won't open them and has no facility for JPeg. I don't understand that!
The new laptop has made an incredible difference, that was the first time I used it, everything worked so fast and accurate, with a little less panic and now a bit more confidence in my equipment, I think I will get somewhere now.

Hi Bill - glad the laptop seems to be doing the trick and taking away all that frustration you had at the start. Perseverance and a bit of dosh go a long way...!

I find the image processing bit of Autostar very quirky so I don't go near it. It seems to do strange things with darks as well as image types. For example, I save some images as TIFF's then tried to open them with autostar image processing - it wouldn't have it all all. Same with JPEG's.

If I'm webcasting, JPEG is the best format. If I want a pretty picture, I save the image as a TIFF then do all my post-processing on the TIFF images in Photoshop - sometimes using Registax if I need to. Then I save the final image as a JPG for distribution, to cut down file sizes.

Unfortunately, I only have Photoshop 5 which can't support the FITS format. I believe later versions of Photoshop can accept the FITS plugin. I have read that it seems to the best format for getting the best out of an image...

Until I can afford a later version of photoshop, FITS is out for me.

Cheers

Dave McD

Until I can afford a later version of photoshop, FITS is out for me.

I think gimp can handle fits files. Though I'm not sure of how well since there seem to be several interpretations of the fits format. Most linux distros come with fits2pnm, and photoshop and gimp can definatly read that.

I've seen a couple of fits manipulation tools for windows which would also let you export to another format, I think fitsview does this www.nrao.edu/software/fitsview/ might e of use...

Cheers,
~Al