I'm curious to know what other planetary imagers do for keeping raw data files from planetary imaging sessions? I currently have some hard drives groaning with nearly 2TB of data (including both raw and processed) from this year's season of imaging. As I'm quite new to this, it's taking me aback a bit. Some of the raw *.ser files are >10GB (cropped area around Mars, 20k frames, for example). I preprocess in PIPP to debayer and select the best 2-4000 frames (depending on raw stack size, more or less), saving as *.avi, and that can be a 2-3GB file even if the frame's trimmed a bit more around the planet. Final images are small after Registax! But one night's data might be 50GB for a number of images of one planet?
So the question is, being that I'm from a science background and hate throwing away raw data
, I'm a bit wary of just keeping the PIPP AVI (and throwing the .ser), but that seems the best approach for not ending up with piles of hard drives
. I'm sort of afraid I might one day learn good new techniques and then find I don't have the raw data to use it on, even if that's quite unlikely. All this isn't an issue for deep sky, there's way less data to worry about!
So what do other imagers do? Soak up huge raw data piles, or trim the data in some way? What do you keep, what do you discard?