astro photography

Sorry to dig this up again but you musnt forget that nowadays astro image processing is primarily about working with MANY images at the same time. It seems that the days of single shot astrophotography is gone. Most people are taking multiple images and stacking them.

Let me tell you my experience. I have 512MB and it is *just* about the minimum useable. If I try to stack any more than a small few full res RAW images, I might as well go watch tv and then hope it hasnt crashed when i get back. Registax throws a wobbler if I try more than 5 or 6 full res TIFS.

Also image sensors are getting bigger all the time. If you dont invest in the RAM now you are gonna need to sooner or later.

I suggest keeping an eye out for the double memory offers on dell.

Darren: I've said this to others and I'll say it again. Please spend some time learning about your new telescope before you spend lots of money on astrophotography gear. The 350D is a great buy,, you wont regret that. Soon you will find out that astrophotography, as well as being one of the most rewarding pursuits, I can think of, can also be one the most frustrating. Take your time! Learn the ropes!

Dave Mc D- agree with the others- only way is to check the manual, or check your PC's original spec. The Motherboard manufacturers sites will usually give you a run down. All RAM is not equal, but it's become less of an issue these days. There was a time that if you wanted fast RAM you had to buy rambus Ram, which cost an arm and a leg, but the DDR stuff is pretty good.

Dave Grennan- still have to disagree- 512 should be fine for what you want to accomplish, but using the TIFF format is probably not a good idea. I know it's lossless and that's a good thing, but unless you are printing very Hi-Res photos it's not really worth it. If you really must have lossless try using PNG instead. Will save you a bundle of disk space too. If you don't print the images hi-res, stick with jpegs- just keep the setting high. A monitor can generally display only 72dpi anyway- which is far less resolution than standard print (300dpi) so you just aren't going to notice unless you compress the images too far. For archiving purposes save them as PNG's or photoshop.

The ram question is not straight forward,
For instance, my 1gig machine turns into a real geriatric when it has 256 MB, and is not so bad at 512MB.

On the other hand, I've another machine running with ~380 megs and its lightening fast.

Dave Grennan- still have to disagree- 512 should be fine for what you want to accomplish, but using the TIFF format is probably not a good idea. I know it's lossless and that's a good thing, but unless you are printing very Hi-Res photos it's not really worth it. If you really must have lossless try using PNG instead. Will save you a bundle of disk space too. If you don't print the images hi-res, stick with jpegs- just keep the setting high. A monitor can generally display only 72dpi anyway- which is far less resolution than standard print (300dpi) so you just aren't going to notice unless you compress the images too far. For archiving purposes save them as PNG's or photoshop.

Dave,

sorry have to completely disagree with you on the tiff thing. Look at it this way, why spend a night freezing ones rear end of, guiding long exposure photos trying to capture the faintest detail and then just throw that faint detail away to jpeg compression? You may be right if all you ever intend to do is post the images on BBS and websites etc, but I want to print mine and allow others to do so too. My attitude is that I want to produce the photos to the limit of my ability and my equipment. There is no way I'm gonna compromise that knowingly by not using the very highest reolution data I can acquire. If that means processing lots of large RAWs and need more RAM then thats what it has to be for me. Others may have a different slant on it, but thats my take. If you look at the very best astrophotographers around, jerry lodriguss, jason ware, don parker, dave mc donagh:) etc, they would consider using anything less than the highest resolution data available, total heresy!!

Hi Dave G,

Tiff is very popular in the community, but folks should really consider changing to PNG. PNG is a *lossless* format and to some extent it was designed to replace and surpass Tiff as an archiving format. The 24bit PNG retains just as much information as a Tiff, but is an awful lot smaller, resulting in less hard disk space and less processing time.
There is one drawback to PNG, it does not have any ICC profile embedded within it, but since we're not managing colour workflow it's not a problem.

and this all started with RAM

Just to correct some bad computer science, a lossless compressed format is NO smaller in RAM than a non-compressed format. When a PNG is loaded by an image processing program it is un-compressed so it can be edited, it is not re-compressed until you write to disk agian.

I still agree people should switch to PNG instead of TIFF but only because they are of equal quality yet faster to download and smaller to store, they will not save you RAM.