Astrofriend

Now it's summer and no dark nights for us here in the north, what to do? Many many years ago I wrote my own functions in Matlab to do astrophoto processing. Now I want to do that again, but Matlab is very expensive so I need some other tool. I have found ImageJ and the more specialized version AstroImageJ (AIJ) let me do this. You can do your own plugins with Java programming or use the built in functions with macros, the later is what I do now in the beginning. AIJ is a multiplatform image tool and handle 32 bit floating point. There are a lot of plugins to download. And it's free ! I have a Canon DSLR camera and AIJ does not open its raw CR2 files direct, but there is a wraparound plugin to DCRAW. Works fine but only opens files one by one. I'm now buliding macros to batchload these raw files and do other things. I have started a tutorial about this AstroImageJ software and later I will place my macros there to download. If you want to try them, have a backup of all your files if anything goes wrong, I'm in the begiining of this. Here is my AstroImageJ tutorial: http://astrofriend.eu/astronomy/tutorials/tutorial-astroimagej/tutorial-aij-01-introduction.html There are links how to download, install and other things. It will come more later. Lars

If it's not the polaralign, could it be that the mount correct for atmosphere refraction, most goto mount do. It's about 1/2 degree at horizon. But no idea what happens when under horizon, maybe just correct with a neg sign. BR /Lars