Modern day ‘ Blink Comparator’ info wanted.

[lguise]

I’ve had an enquiry from a local gent who uses remote data from a telescope in Tenerife. He wants a modern equivalent of a Blink Comparator, so I presume he is searching for Novae or minor planets etc.

I suggested that modern plate solving software has probably now replaced a mechanical comparator and the human eye, but I promised to ask on this forum for suggestions

Any thoughts I can go back to him with?

Many thanks,

Linton

 

[andrew s]

I think most astroimaging packages have them built in. I would look at the free astroimagej first. @vlaiv will be along to confirm if it has one.

Regards Andrew 

Edited September 6, 2023 by andrew s

[lguise]

Many thanks for the suggestion Andrew.

[vlaiv]

AstroImageJ is certainly worth looking into - it has a lot of astronomy related tools, mostly aimed for photometry and astrometry (it uses external plate solver I believe).

However, blink sort of thing is rather easy to do in regular ImageJ (above AstroImageJ is just bunch of tools build on top of regular ImageJ - both are open source and quite extensible with plugins and macros) - it has feature called Stack - which represents sequence of images that you can work with. For example, to quickly see if there is something interesting in the data - I'd use plugin that registers frames based on some features (it'll use stars if you select local maxima and tweak some parameters) and then you can simply create standard deviation projection of that aligned stack.

This will show if there are significant outliers in any of the subs. If there are any - then you can start "blinking" / searching for them and so on.

[stuarts]

Doesn't MaxIm DL, AIP4WIN and Astrometrica have Blink Comparators ?

Edited September 6, 2023 by stuarts

[DaveS]

AstroArt and PixInsight both have blink facilities, I suspect every other serious astro processing software will as well.

[lguise]

Many thanks Vlaiv, Stuart & Dave, that’s great information for me to pass on. It’s not my area of expertise but I’m sure he will be able to get to grips with it.

All the Best,

Linton