NEAIC Underway!

The Northeast Astronomical Imaging Conference is starting its second day. Yesterday’s set of talks were great.

The plenary session by Ken Crawford provided some interesting ideas on how to bring out image details. His focus was on techniques appropriate to what he labelled "technical art" wherein he spends quite a bit of time using various image masks to selectively process parts of the image to bring out local features.

I then attended Thierry LeGault’s presentation on solar imaging. Thierry was a wonderful speaker; in spite of English being a second language (his native tongue is French), his sense of humor was evident as was his skill in solar imaging.

I picked up a number of new ideas on how process images from Richard Berry’s talk where he demonstrated some common image problems and how to solve them using the program AIP4Win written by him and Jim Burnell. This one definitely sends me home with a few new tricks in my bag.

The last talk I attended was on the topic of "Guiding on the Cheap" given by Craig Stark of PHD "fame." PHD is his autoguiding software package that runs on Windows and Mac OS X; PHD stands for "Push Here Dummy" and is supposed to take the guesswork out of setting up your guider. Craig was a wonderful speaker full of good tips and promoting a lot of common-sense in his approach to autoguding.