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MAY 27, 2016 - General Membership Meeting at 8:00 PM
at the Portage Lakes Kiwanis Civic Center
  725 Portage Lakes Dr
Akron, OH  44319

Click for map and directions

Please note that we ALWAYS encourage the public to attend ANY of our events, including meetings.
Come and enjoy the lecture and talk to us about astronomy!

NOTE!!   Tonight is the last meeting prior to our three month summer break.
If you need to renew your dues, please come prepared to do so and make our Treasurer happy. ;^)

8:00 PM - Call to order and introduction of tonight's program:

Speaker:

John Harkey

Presentation:

Signal Processing for Image Processing in Astronomy
 

Images are collections of photon traces that can yield information about the stars and the universe. Those same images can be thought of as collections of signals along arbitrary axes that take the one-dimensional photon dot to a two-dimensional sequence. This allows the data to be processed by any number of the vast world of signal processing algorithms. The data can be integrated and averaged to enhance the brightness and contrast. If data is used from many images, this process can add detail that cannot normally be seen by the naked eye. In some cases, these images take a sufficiently long period of time to collect that it cannot be done in one session, in one night. This creates a new problem that different collections need to be aligned with each other because it is impossible to align equipment to the exact same orientation and still be affordable to the amateur astronomer.

 


Click the small images below to see the original sized documents

                     
 

About our speaker:

John Harkey is a recently retired Electrical/Software Engineer and has been an amateur astronomer for 35 years.  He recently purchased an inexpensive digital camera, a GE 1440 costing only $60, and interfaced it to his 8" Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope using a 3D printed fixture.  He saw the need to integrate images taken over a single night or more, in order to collect enough light from some objects.  John used his expertise to write some image processing software to correlate, align, and integrate images of any size.  This software also translates, rotates, magnifies, offsets, and amplifies images.  It has an interface so that users can create their own image processing algorithms and is supported by an additional signal processing program that shares the same data format of the image processing software so that data may be copied from one program to the other with just two mouse clicks.  The programs actually do lots more. John is willing to share these things with ACA members for just simply using them and offering some feedback to him. That's his motivation for speaking to us tonight.

   
 
9:00 PM - Brief coffee-break / discussion time
 
9:15 PM - Business meeting to be called to order and will include the following:
  ●  Treasurer's Report
  ●  Observatory Director's Report
  ●  Calls for observations
  ●  New Business

To contact club officers with questions or comments, please visit our Contacts page
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