Another Members Evening started with Greg Smye-Rumsby giving us a quick overview of the results obtained from the Time Team Big Dig at the site of the Craig Telescope on Wandsworth Common. He explained the significance of a few of the finds. We expect to hear more about this early next year. Jeff Harries gave a brief report of the all-night observing evening, and Paul Whitmarsh added a report of the Mercury Transit that followed. Tony Buick showed us a number of pictures of the transit. Finally, Ian Tonks gave us a live demonstration of a couple of image stacking and processing programs, using an AVI file he’d taken during an evening of exceptional seeing early in the year. The results produced by both these programs were impressive.
- Registax An excellent CCD image processing program with some clever tricks for sorting, registering, selecting and stacking images from a CCD webcam.
- QCUIAG The QuickCam and Unconventional Imaging Astronomy Group. A mine of information about using webcams and the like to capture astronomical images.
- K3 CCD tools Another CCD image stacking program, with a handy wizard and some fancy features. (The website can be a bit tricky to navigate using browsers other than IE, though. The site’s designer would do well to take on board some of the ideas behind The Any Browser Campaign.)