Software Bisque CCDSoft

Software Bisque CCDSoft

A Friendly, Dependable Tool. Software Bisque CCDSoft

As an experienced observer, you know the necessity of dependable equipment, and this applies to your software as well. Nature provides enough obstacles - you don't want your software to become another one. CCDSoft was written and tested by experienced observers. Hundreds of hours testing under actual observing conditions provided the insight for developing the CCDSoft user interface to ensure that you spend your time gathering data instead of fumbling in the dark.

CCDSoft is charting a new course for astronomical image processing software by combining power with ease of use. At one star gathering, we left our computer momentarily unattended and came back to find two 10 year olds taking images!

CCDSoft's Host of Image-Processing Features. The following is a partial list of the image-processing features found in CCDSoft:

Blink Compare - Quickly flash between two or more images to make small differences stand out. Great for comet, minor planet and super nova serching.

Combine - Combine two images through addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, blend, and, or, exclusive or, dark subtract and flat field.

Convert To - Convert any image to a greyscale or black-and-white image. Convert a 24-bit true colour image to a 256-colour image. Even produce a false colour image.

Custom Filters - Build your own digital filters, convolve them with your image.

Equalization - Reassign brightness levels equally across the entire range of pixel values.

Histogram Brighten - Non-linearly brighten an image.

Histogram with Statistics - Graphically represent the data, readily determine where the data lies, and pinpoint brightness ranges for scaling the image.

Image Information - View information about any file; many formats are supported by CCDSoft including FITS, JPEG, Photo CD, TIF, GIF, all SBIG file formats and more.

Night Vision - A red screen preserves your night vision while downloading images.

Live Zoom - Drag a magnification box to any part of your image. Choose from two modes, normal and linear.

Outline - Display edges within an image.

Palette Display - View the palette associated with any image, and modify colours with complete control. The Palette dialog provides many funtions such as rotate palette, animate palette, x-ray and more.

Pixelize - Average the pixel brightness values over a specified region.

Posterization - Limit the number of brightness levels present in an image.

Print - Print a hard copy of any image CCDSoft can display.

Resample - Make rectangular pixels square.

RGB Combine - Combine the three colour components of an image (red, green, blue) to produce a true colour image.

Rotate - Rotate an image to any angle.

Size an Image - Expand or compress your image to fit any size window.

Smooth Filters - Average, Custom average and Blur filters.

Transfer Function - Graphicall define your own transfer function to stretch, scale or mask your image. The possibilities are endless!

Unsharp Mask - Enhance faint detail in planetary images.

Richardson-Lucy - Enhance faint detail with this popular image processing function.

Also ... Brightness & Contrast, Negative, Copy and Paste to//from Windows Clipboard, Sharpen, Flip, Duplicate, Crop, Shift, Hot and Cold Pixel removal.

CCDSoft supports many different image file formats including: All SBIG file formats (ST-4 through ST-8), ARN, BMP, RLE, DIB, EPS, IMG, PDS, GIF, JPEG, LNX, PCX, PCT, PCD, TGA, TIFF, WPG.

Image and Track at the Same Time In the past, those interested in taking long exposures were required to sit at the telescope for the duration of the photograph, manually adjusting controls. With the advent of the CCD autoguider, much of the difficulty is removed by letting the CCD monitor and adjust the telescope's drive system. CCDSoft takes this one step further by controlling TWO CCD's simultaneously, one for tracking on a star, the other for imaging objects.

Image Browser The image browsing portion of CCDSoft allows you to create lists of images by selecting them from directories, then viewing these lists as a slide show - continuously, or image by image. As your image database grows, you'll want to use the Browser for easy access to them - and to show them off!

Imaging Modes While focusing your camera on a bright object you can define which portion of the CCD detector you want to download - simply drag a rectangle on an image to define the portion of the detector to aquire. This dramatically reduces download time.

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