Creating and Enhancing Digital Astro Images

The book will, in jargon-free blow-by-blow terms, describe how to create the best astronomical images you can with the digital camera equipment at your disposal. It will explain the steps we go through to extract results from the raw-and-dirty original imagery, and then transform them into high quality pictures that you could hang on your wall.

The advent of CCDs, and more recently inexpensive webcams, has led to a much greater proportion of amateur astronomers becoming involved in digital imaging. The low price of the new Meade Deep Sky Imager - $299 (2005) - suggests that within a few years a simple digital camera will become a standard accessory for any telescope.

To summarise; this is a book that tells practical astronomers (and that includes some but not all professionals) what is needed to get from standing in the dark with a telescope and a camera, to showing your spouse, local society friends or even supervisor the astonishing images that can be obtained with simple equipment but the right software and knowledge of how to use it.

Acknowledgements. -The myriad advantages of image processing (introduction). - Choosing a camera. - Acquiring images (and choosing software). - Displaying images. - Image reduction. - Flat fields. - Dark subtraction. - Image transformations. - Image stacking. - Image mosaicing. - Image scaling and histograms. - Background gradients. - Image enhancement. - Image sharpening. - Image unsharp masking. - Image deconvolution. - Handling colour images. - Achieving colour balance. - CMY or RGB? - Other problems. - Handling image sequences and webcams. - Image acquisition. - Image quality techniques. - Automated image processing. - What is best for. - Planets. - Deep Sky. - Widefield imaging. - The pitfalls. - Postscript. - Notes on image contributors. - Appendices . - Software. - Hardware + Software Suppliers. - References. - Further reading. - Index.