DSLR Documentation and Reduction

Needs a general introduction...

IRIS

Iris is a general purpose astronomical image processing software suite by Christian Buil with both English and French translations that runs on Windows, and under WINE in Linux. It is very full featured, updated frequently, and has a modest number of "how to" articles written for it.  The program is free to download and use.

Where to get it:
The download and installation instructions can be found on Christian's AstroSurf webpage.

AIP4WIN

AIP4WIN comes as software bundled with the book The Handbook of Astronomical Image Processing written by Richard Berry and James Burnell.  It is a very through book that discusses image analysis, astrometry, photometry and spectroscopy.  The bundle sells for $100.00

Where to get it:Read more

I just realized that we don't have a team logo (it's just the blank CS logo at the moment). Anyone care to submit something? Just attach to a reply to this message.

BrianRead more

What you will need



You will need the following things to perform good variable star photometry with digital cameras:

Hi, this is may way of using MaximDL.

Can someone check this out?

regards, Hubert

Open MaximDL.
Select File – open : select the files you want to analyze.
After the files are opened select Analyze – photometry
You get two boxes open : one information box and one photometry box.
In the photometry box you see the image list with all the selected images.
You can also see “tagged objects”. (Here comes the object you want to analyze).
Click on the “mouse click tags as” and select new object.
This new object will be Epsilon Auriga.
Click on Epsilon Auriga.
In the Tagged Object box “obj1” appears.
Then in “mouse click tags as” click on new reference star.
The reference star is the comparisonstar you will use. In this case it is Eta Auriga. In the “ref mag” box you give the magnitude of the reference star after selecting the reference star. In this case 3.172. Read more

Has anyone fully characterized their DSLR camera? I think this is an important step in getting good data. I've created a Wiki page for this topic and would greatly appreciate anyone who could fill in the blanks.

I wonder whether it could be useful to have an Excel sheet accompanying the tutorials.

The one I dream of would do calibration (Color coefficient), magnitude computations and statistical quality measures (SD).

It would have a range of data (B-V and mag) for comparison stars ready for use. You would just enter the instr. mags next to the comparison stars and the Excel sheet would do the rest.

What do you think? Any Excel gurus here?

CU
BikemanRead more

NOTE: This is not the "live" page on the Citizen Sky website for the IRIS Analysis Tutorial.  Brian must update the main site, please send him an email whenever you make significant revisions to this document.  Please regard the below content as a "rough draft" and feel free to edit it to make it current.

This tutorial provides a step-by-step procedure for processing digital images obtained in raw format to yield insturmental magnitudes which are used in the next step in our tutorial, processing the data using Excel. This process assumes that, in addition to a series of sequential star field images, dark frames, flat frames and flat-dark frames have been taken. This tutorial also assumes that you have already copied the images from your camera to some directory on your computer (this greatly speeds up processing).Read more

I have followed the instructions of the manual for Maxim DL. But I lack the procedure for subtracting the darks. And I think that step 10 is to complicated. Like I understand it I must examine every images. Isn't it better to tag the variable star as new object and the compstar as new reference star? Then I can give in the magnitude for the compstar , in this case 3.172, and click view plot. That gives a file with the magnitudes of the variable and these magnitudes can be averaged.

regards, Hubert
http://www.vvs.be/wg/wvs/Read more