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Good article DP. A couple of comments:
- I've loaded about 6000 BMP files into registax using drag n drop without it crashing, I think the number is limited mostly by the buffer that Windows allocated to hold filenames during a drag n drop, it's a 64k buffer as far as I know, maybe that's fixed under winxp? Anyway, you should be able to load a lot more than 300 or so.
- There's a way in Windows to add "Start command prompt here" into the Windows Explorer so you can right-click on a directory and start a cmd prompt in that directory. You might be able to setup a shortcut for ppmcentre to do the same thing so that the user doesn't need to see the command prompt at all.
- The reason your images brighten up in AA is that it automatically applies a histogram stretch on greyscale images, i.e. the brightest pixel in your image is mapped to white. You can always use the "scale" dialog later on to reduce the brightness if you like, and no information is lost in this process.
- In the RGB combine, I'd recommend zooming in a couple of steps and panning around to see if the colour planes are lined up. Sometimes a shift of just 1 pixel here or there can make a noticeable difference but they can be hard to see if you stay at the 1x zoom.
- Might be worth suggesting that the "best" time for imaging a planet is just a couple of months after inferior conjunction when it's high up in the pre-dawn sky, say around 4am. If people try and image at that time of night then a lot of the hidden problems with temperature etc can be minimised without them having to really know much about it.
I have heard a lot of people comment that they wait until the planet is high in the sky at around 9pm (i.e. after opposition) before they try imaging it, just because it's more convenient to set up at that time of night - BUT they usually add that they couldn't see anything at all and were feeling like it was a waste of time. 8" or larger newts/sct's will most likely be working very badly at that time of night, especially since most people will not allocate the leadup time to let the scope cool down.
regards, Bird
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