Dan Driscoll has been busy taking images with his ST6 CCD camera, primarily through the White 12.5" reflector at the Bog. He recently gave me some to experiment with while he was away on vacation (presumably he'll get some images from real dark skies near Thunder Bay!). I'll come back to his images in a moment.

The clubs' ST4 camera/auto-guider is being rotated amongst interested members, usually on a month-by- month basis. Contact me to get on the rotation list or to get more information.

Jay Yang has been testing the BBS software for our proposed image library and we gave a brief demo after the June meeting. Unfortunately the XT computer we had planned to launch this system is not up to the task, so Jay has been letting us run tests from his own computer. We are currently looking to buy a previously enjoyed (used, that is) 386 system with at least 2 megabytes of memory and a reliable hard drive. A VGA card and inexpensive monitor would be nice, but we can cobble together components from different sources. If you know of anyone thinking of upgrading their system soon and are willing to part with the old "386" for a resonably low price, please let me know asap. We would like to get the BBS operational this fall.

The club decided at the annual meeting to defer the purchase of another club CCD camera until after Starfest. Although this was a letdown to the CCD'ers, in retrospect it will mean that by the time we feel financially ready to get a higher grade of camera there will be better prices. This is due to the growing field of choices in commercial cameras (Meade recently began offering 6 models!) and the publication of Richard Berry's CCD COOKBOOK for do-it-yourselfers (like some of us).

Speaking of do-it-yourselfers, Nelson Chow is the first member in the club to build one based on the Berry formula (plus some unique changes of his own). As of this writing Nelson has imaged across his living room and will probably have some astronomical pics by the time he does a "show and tell" at the next CCD SIG meeting (Aug 20 - see page 2). Many others have purchased the book, and some have begun work (so I've heard). Cone on out to the meeting and let us know how you're doing and share some tips on building or finding parts.

Now to Dan's Images, some of which are printed here. I have been working with about 30 Messier and 10 NGC images (two with supernovas), plus a shot of Takamizawa-Levy 1994. Dan used Hidden Image to read in the ST6 format and then convert to TIFF. The original data is 16-bit, however there is still quite a lot of information in the resulting 8 bit TIFF format.

Since I have not bought an astronomical IP package capable of processing the ST6 data, I have been using the Aldus PhotoStyler Special Edition to do the manipulations you see printed here. Initially I altered the brightness and Contrast and got interesting results by then changing the Gamma curve to emphasize the fainter details in the extended objects. These results were still flat (low contrast). I then tried a different approach by using the Equalization Tuning function first to spread the available pixel data across the 256 available values and then used the Grey/Color Correction to set the Gamma curve at very low values - typically 0.16 with the zero cuttoff set high enough to darken the sky backround. This latter approach gives more pleasing results of higher contrast while still retaining faint detail. The images printed here are done this way. I have taken some slides of the computer screen showing these techniques and will show them at the next CCD SIG meeting.