Unfortunately, it appears that there is no further information in the CCDSoft help files, or in the manual. I am assuming that that the function, when invoked, plots a contour map of the number of photons per charge well (pixel) and then allocates a colour accordingly.
When I isolate a single star in the Vixen 4” refractor image, and magnify it (see new image uploaded in this post), we can see the x & y cursor position as well as the photon count of the pixel at that location, as displayed in the status bar. As the mouse cursor is moved across the magnified star, these values change. In the example uploaded, the coordinates are x=009, y=012 and the number of photons =10,532 at that location.
- The image scale with the ED102S refractor at f9 is 2.02 arc sec per pixel, which would be good seeing.
- The image scale with the C9.25 at F10 is 0.79 arc sec per pixel, which is extremely rare.
- The image scale with the C9.25 with the F6.3 Reducer/Corrector is 1.25 arc sec per pixel which is excellent seeing.
The example images uploaded in the original post show stars with exposures for over 60 secs, therefore atmospheric smearing, drive errors, etc will have affected the contour plots. However, for shorter exposures of say 3 to 5 seconds, I’m sure we would be capturing the actual intensity plots of the diffraction rings; hence they would provide us with a view of the state of collimation of the optical system.
Until the next clear night…….
Cheers
Dennis