MISAO Project

Home Page       Tue Aug 19 18:00:36 JST 1997

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Existing state and problems of astronomical images

As you know, astronomical photographers mainly has changed from old photographs to cooled CCD cameras rapidly in these several years.

Comparing to an old photograph, CCD has a high sensitivity and helps to reduce exposure time Also, it yields the result as a digital data, which needs no space physically and will never rot. On the contrary, a CCD can be reused, not as a film, which makes mass production easy. Else, the user can see the image just after taking it and can retry again if failed. Furthermore, a CCD does not bends as a film and has a linear response to the input light. These mean that the user can get much more precise results than using older photographs. Because of these many advantages, CCD became a main media after old photographs.

The most important thing is that CCD's popularization set up an atmosphere of mass production of astronomical images. Actually, enormous images are being yielded for various observations and patrolling at large observatories in the world. In addition personal CCD users are also increasing and they products much more images than when using old photographs.

The more the number of images increases, the higher the possibility becomes that a new object happens to be in the image by chance. So increasing of images should cause increasing of discovered new objects. However, those accidental discovery is not so increasing, though the number of discovery is increasing but they are mainly because many sky survey projects started by CCD's popularization. Actually quite a few people checks their CCD images whether a new object is in them. It implies many unknown objects are buried in those enormous images. That is to be improved.

The current situation mentioned above is mainly because of these two reasons.

  • Images are managed independently at each observatory or person
    Quite a few people checks their CCD images whether a new object is in them. Even if some do it, they only check their own images and others are still remain unchecked. Even if some want to check others' images too, most of the images at observatories are not in the public, or even if they are available via WWW or so, they requires complex steps to use. Personal images are mostly unreachable via networks and cannot be utilized, for example, saved in MO disks. That means, most images are hoarded in dead with no check.
  • No proper checking softwares
    When some want to check their images, they have to detect all stars from their images, identify each with stars in catalogs and check known objects. These processes are too difficult for many people. But the softwares who are already in use by high amateurs or professionals become rarely popular. So the newcomers have to study everything from A to Z by themselves.

The purpose of this research is to make it possible for everyone to check whether his or her own images have a new object, especially through networks, and decrease hoarded images in dead.

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Next: Images and processors data- Up: Automated New Objects Detection Previous: Automated New Objects Detection

Copyright(C) Seiichi Yoshida (comet@aerith.net). All rights reserved.