[Sali]

This is a photo of the 11/12/2011 total lunar eclipse from 32 13 S taken with my naked iPhone3Gs. No attachments, lenses or other peripheral harware - not even a tripod! Sigh. This was the first astrophotograph I ever took - so it has sentimental value more than anything. Obviously the original raw photo was unimpressive - so I wrote a program called Starsoup to fix it. I'll quicklly explain what Starsoup does, then lead into my actual question:

The program reverse-engineers the JPG format and sorts out actual objects in the image from the weird green soup you'll find if you capture an iPhone photo in total darkness. Basically, you point the iPhone at the night sky, take a photo, run the photo through Starsoup and the program tells you where all the stars are. Then it spits out a new image with ONLY the stars, cutting out all the useless soup. Chuck the clean image into your nearest favourite image editor and you've got yourself an actual picture of something - rather than murky green noise.

So why bother? There are definately better and more expensive ways to do this - like get a propper camera! But on a technical level, adjustments in programs like GIMP, Photoshop or, really, any other photo-editing program are not biased enough to recognise the difference between starlight and soupy noise. Some people might actually consider that a good thing. But even if you stick to pure stacking of the image, an unclean capture from a dirty camera can turn out looking VERY different from one cleaned by Starsoup. Often the noise can be mistaken for starlight. Ouch. My dream is for someone to take this idea and make a GIMP plugin out of it for easy application.



But today, I'm simply rewriting the "bias algorithms" in Starsoup to cut through more layers of compression (to find stars even if they have been compressed 2 or 3 times). The attached image is from the ORIGINAL version of Starsoup. It keeps a 3x3 grid of pixels around the star and stacks the opaque image over a blured layer. The blurred layer is just an arbitrary throw-back to light-leaking in film (for effect only).

So... My Question:

Do you consider it "bad form" to have a blur-layer to accentuate the stars? I can take it out of version 2.0 if it's not as cool as I thought.



I feel pretty noobish writing code to fix my cruddy photos, but maybe this program will have a more usefull application for the hobby later on. Who knows?