Astro IIDCOverview
Astro IIDC works with a wide variety of low and high end, color or monochrome, 8 or 16 bit FireWire 400, FireWire 800 cameras and PGR USB 2 / 3 Cameras. It has a simple intuitive interface, can record movies, grab frames, grab averaged frames, grab sums of frames, has extensive Altivec / SSE3 optimization for real time processing for flat field, dark frame, image alignment and stacking, supports movie recording at 240+ fps to disk or as long as 1 hour per frame. The application utilizes our industrial strength Altivec / SSE3 optimized IIDC/DCAM Version 3.0 Framework to control the camera and extracts the raw bayer or monochrome images from the CCD.
NEW
- Increased the number of multiple cores that the movie alignment code can use from 16 to 24 - just in case Apple ever updates the Mac Pro desktop models.
- Rewrote the movie stacking code to continue working with movies where the movie frames may be corrupted due to disk errors. The frames that can be read up until the media error occurs is found will be processed. Attempting to read beyond this multiple times will cause QuickTime to erratically crash - so we can't go any further.
- Added ability to invert the image used for guiding, so people can image and guide on a sunspot at the same time.
- Added ability to Load or Save Guiding Calibration data so you can Calibrate your mount once and re-use it over and over.
- Added ability to export all the frames in a movie to a series of FITS Files.
- Added ability to crop movies and retain the depth (Mono 8, Mono 16, RGB 48 or ARGB32), frame rate and the MetaData Time Code Track.
- Added ability to cut up a movie into a series of Reference movies - at a user specified amount of time.
- Added ability to manually align a series of images and create a tweened animated movie from it.
- Moved the Flat Frame Correct, Dark Frame Subtract, Field De-Rotate, Relative Photometry and measure Astrometry movie code into background Cooperative threads and added a Progress window for them.
- The "Auto Measure Photometrics..." item under the "Processing" menu code has been changed to use an X/Y Ratio of 4 to 1 or 1 to 4 for width / height for deciding what qualifies as valid objects. This will now measure the brightness of small faint galaxies or faint fuzzy objects.
- Fixed a bug with the "Live Image Alignment Method" code not working when used with 16 bit cameras.
- Fixed a bug where the Top Coordinate for Soft ROI was not being read back from the preferences and applied the next time the camera was used. This could cause all sorts of weird crap to happen when recording a movie.
- Fixed bug that only occurred if your had 3 or more CPUs and check marked the "Adjust pixel area brightness if frame brightness changes." option when stacking. It would cause stacking to erratically fail. This was an absolute PITA to track down.
- Fixed a bug where the "Mount Control…" menu item would be left enabled erroneously without the Video window being up. Guiding can't work unless video is already running.
