MAW I
September 14th, 2005 by Marcos
I’m back from the first Macintosh Astronomy Workshop in Chicago, which I think was a success. I gave a talk about IRAF on the Macintosh, and tried to do some demoes but ran out of time. I’m told I gave a good talk… in retrospect I wolud have talked less about IRAF and showed off some of its capabilities more.
Other talks were interestin, many dealt with improving image quality - since the crowd was mostly amateurs. The coolest thing I saw was the “luminate” ability in photoshop, where a grayscale sharp layer can “luminate” a softer color layer and hold all the detail of an image. Pretty slick. I was less impressed with Photoshop as an image-stacking tool - I’ll take imcombine and imalign over that pretty much any day of the week.
Also, some cool astronomy programs mentioned were Astroplanner for planning observing sessions, iCCD for CCD control, Scope Driver, and the famous Starry Night, particularly Starry Night Pro Plus, I believe.
I’m not sure there are enough versions of Starry Night. I mean there are the five listed in the product comparision page, plus Starry Night High school and Middle school. Are they really thinking outside box? How about Starry Night Sand Lot, or Starry Night Slim, maybe a Starry Night Kindergarten - I think a dozen Starry Nights is certainly possible. No need to stop at seven!
Kudos to Jeff Terry for making MAW a success; it was quite an undertaking and he did a great job.
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