Image Enhancement

Abstract

We have reached the point where the laborious image reduction stage is behind us and we have an image created from our mass of darks, flats and images. This is the point at which to backup the image both to hard disk and also to some removable media such as a DVD, USB memory stick or CD, as a permanent record. You will find that adopting a consistent approach to filenames that involves the date and object name will save a lot of time later. In the old days of Windows 3.1 or DOS the naming issue was worth thinking about, as a name could be at best 11 characters long. No such limitation now exists, so give all the information. Something like: Date-OBJECT-scope-camera-exposures.FIT or similar, contains much of the information you might need, in the title itself. An example might be: 20060103-ngc2903-lx200-sbig8-10x60s.fit where the image is taken on the January 3rd, 2006 — I used a YYYYMMDD format to allow directory/folder contents to be displayed chronologically. The object targeted was the galaxy NGC 2903 in Leo. I used a Meade LX200 and SBIG8 CCD camera. The exposures were of 60s long and there were 10 of them. As you can see the format is quite compact.