The photographic “darkroom” takes on a different guise when you work with digital data.  This picture shows my “digital darkroom” where FITS images from the SXVF-M25C and other cameras are pre-processed before sending them off via Broadband link to Noel Carboni for processing and enhancement.

Lets take a quick trip around the room.

Computing Power 

The computer behind it all is based on an Intel Core 2 (dual processor) running at 2.13GHz and with 2.00G of RAM.  There are three internal hard drives (two SATA, one IDE) all at 250G and there’s external network storage of 1 Terabyte for all the image data.  One of the half-Terabyte drives can be seen to the left of the printer, it is the white rectangular box.

I use twin 17″ monitors so that I can keep the uncluttered image to be worked on sitting on the left hand monitor, while all the menus I am using are on the right hand monitor.  The keyboard and mouse are wireless.

Printing

To the right hand side of the image you can see the superb HP Designjet 130 six colour printer I use to print out our images.  I use 200 g.s.m. satin finish photo quality paper and I can testify to the resistance of these prints to fading as I have had an image of the North America and Pelican nebulae [on the wall behind the right hand monitor] in direct sunlight for 2 years with no apparent adverse effects - very impressive!  By comparison, a simple print from an A4 colour printer faded in less than 2 weeks under similar conditions.

You can also see a number of other A4-sized images on the wall being “life-tested” under fairly harsh lighting conditions.

Pre-processing 

The pre-processing is as follows.

1. Colour convert the raw FITS data for each sub-exposure using Maxim DL.
2. Open up each sub-exposure and check the image for planes, satellites or PEC glitches.
3. Remove unsatisfactory sub-exposures.
4. Use the SD mask combine function in Maxim DL to stack all the individual sub-exposures together.
5. Save the resulting colour-converted and stacked file as a floating point IEEE FITS file.
6. Send the IEEE floating point FITS file to Noel Carboni for processing into a deep-space work of art.