AstroArt and Big Files

[Interested]

Hi all,

I wondered if anyone else has had problems with AA and whether you have resolved it.

A single exposure using the Atik 383 is about 14-15 Meg. Stacking in DSS is fine but on trying to process the stacks in AA (to get a colour image using Trichnomy) I get an "Out of Memory" error or memory violation errors. Even using pre-processing in AA can cause the problem.

I emailed the author but he wasn't very helpful. He did say that the file limit was 2 Gigs but I get the error messages with 3x66 Meg files.

Any help would be appreciated. I'm also open to suggestions on alternative software (intend buying CS5 in the near future).

Many thanks,

[ollypenrice]

You say Trichromy (rather than CCD colour synthesis) so this is a mono routine you are using? In that case I would stack the reds, the greens and the blues separately and combine them. This should place no great demands on the system.

When using CCD colour synthesis for the OSC camera I routinely ran out of memory in AA4 at the stacking/debayering stage and had to make smaller stacks and combine those, which was a pest. There was a memory leak which meant that I had to log off and log on again to clear enough memory. This had nothing to do with the PC since it happened even on a big desk machine. This nuisance has entirely disappeared from AA5 which works fine for CCD colour synthesis now.

Olly

[Interested]

Hi Olly,

Thanks for your response.

I have AA5. I had no problem using the software with my Atik 314. I stack each chanel using DSS. Once done, I opened the files in AA5, aligned all, then used Trichromy to produce a colour image. Doing the same with the 383 (mono) RG&B stacks, I get the "out of memory error". It doesn't like aligning or combining them. I've tried stacking the individual chanels using pre-processing in AA5 and again, I get problems - if it does combine them, the colours are misaligned and then I get the "access violation in memory" errors. I emailed Dr. Fabio Cavicchio at Astroart and he suggested I was doing something wrong - he didn't answer a second email! He said the memory limit was 2 gigabits - which I don't get anywhere near!

Nice to know AA4 had similar problems with smaller files.......maybe they will fix my problem in AA6!!