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Astro IIDC Changelog

What's new in Astro IIDC 4.07.03

Jan 14, 2012
  • Increased the granularity of "Apply xxx gradient leveling to reduce uneven illumination" pop up menu in the "Stacking Options..." window from 10% increments to 5% increments. In some cases 10% changes was to coarse.
  • Fixed x86 endian bug when generating the CLUT table for 8 bit monochrome movies with "Dark Frame Subtract Movie…", "Flat Frame Correct Movie..." and "Field Derotate Movie…". Previously the resulting movie would not be playable.
  • Fixes a sporadic crashing bug, if you have the  "Use XXXX gross alignment method" pop up menu set to "Lunar - Solar", and also have the "Use XXXX pixel areas for fine alignment" pop up menu set to an automatic selection method.

New in Astro IIDC 4.07.02 (Nov 28, 2011)

  • Added "Colorize Mono Preview" which allows you cosmetically colorize the Preview window using a user defined maximum color.
  • Added Auto exposure control for AVT Cameras that do not support the floating point absolute exposure register.
  • Provided workaround for AVT cameras delivering 16 bit video in little endian format, which is a blatant violation of the IIDC Specification.
  • Added "Measure Astrometrics.." item under the "Processing" menu that allows you to track and measure the RA - Dec Coordinates of moving objects such as asteroids and comets.
  • Fixed a bug with using "Processing R G B.." align with small (< 640x480) images.
  • Fixed a design flaw with using the "Lunar - Solar" gross alignment method and "Scaling frames by:" 2x or larger option when stacking.

New in Astro IIDC 4.07.01 (Oct 24, 2011)

  • Removed Kagi as payment option and changed the Take me to ASC's web site button to only go to our PayPal store.
  • Fixed a bug with the "Show Saturated" code where it was not working properly.
  • When doing differential photometric measurements, the detailed report now includes the maximum pixel value under the "MaxValue" column. You can use this to determine if any stars in the inner aperture have saturated.
  • Changed the default trigger pin outs for the PGR cameras so that they are always configured as inputs and in a low state. They are reconfigured on the fly top other states based on user interaction.
  • Fixed an issue where selecting "Use Pin 4 for Trigger" menu item under "Camera Trigger Method" submenu of the "Camera" menu would change that menu item to show that it is ALWAYS using Pin 4 and could not be unchecked. Even worse, it would not set the Camera to use Pin 4 for trigger.
  • You can no longer select the "Camera Trigger Method" sub menu if a PGR camera is in the "Allow PGR Extended Exposure Times" mode AND the camera is actually doing long exposures. To access the "Camera Trigger Method", change the Base CCD Exposure time to 266 ms or faster exposure times and then you can select it. When in long exposure mode changing items in the "Camera Trigger Method" could screw up things, so now you can't change anything while you are doing trigger pin related long exposures.
  • Added Code to support "PGR GPIO to ST4" board. Information on building the board is covered on page 106 of the Astro IIDC Manual.
  • There is an issue that one needs to be aware of when using the "PGR GPIO to ST4" board. The default state for PGR cameras when they are powered up is is to have GPIO pin 0 set to trigger pin high. Because of this, the mount will have the ST4 port RA-ve motor engaged when the camera powers up. This can cause "odd" issues with the behavior of some mounts (i.e. my HEQ5 for instance) such as exceedingly slow slewing / Got To because the ST4 port is in use, or refusing to do a star alignment. So the only way to work around it is to power up the guide camera first, launch Astro IIDC so it can set the GPIO pins correctly and then power up your mount. As long as you do not power down the guiding camera then the GPIO pins will be left low and this problem will not happen. So you need just launch Astro IIDC and let it open the guide camera, then quit Astro IIDC(leaving the all the pins in a low state) and then power up your mount.

New in Astro IIDC 4.07.00 (Jul 1, 2011)

  • Automated Photometry for measuring star brightness
  • Extensive SSE3 optimizations providing 100 to 400% speed improvements in image processing and stacking for x86
  • PreSet settings for stacking different object types to make stacking easier
  • Improvements to live FWH/HFD sharpness measurements
  • Auto re-sizing of all image related windows to full screen size and a few bug fixes.

New in Astro IIDC 4.06.04 (Dec 10, 2010)

  • Fixes an issue with displaying temperatures for IIDC cameras that use the floating point temperature api, which prevented the Flea 3 series form displaying camera temperatures properly.

New in Astro IIDC 4.06.03 (Dec 6, 2010)

  • Fixes a grievous memory leak with camera buffers not being properly released.
  • Fixes an endian swapping bug when dark frame subtracting or field de-rotating a 16 bit movie.

New in Astro IIDC 4.06.02 (Nov 22, 2010)

  • Fixes a computation bug when calculating the relative and absolute magnitudes (log versus log10).

New in Astro IIDC 4.06.01 (Oct 6, 2010)

  • Fixes two crashing bugs. The first occur when using the Medium and Wide spacing for sharpness estimation and the second is in the SSE3 / Altivec alignment code under edge cases.

New in Astro IIDC 4.05.04 (Nov 23, 2009)

  • Adds finer (+/- 0.10 millisecond) control of exposure, enhances text log files and works around a bunch of Apple induced bugs for Leopard (10.5.x), Snow Leopard (10.6.x) and QuickTime 7.5.x.

New in Astro IIDC 4.05.03 (Sep 18, 2009)

  • Addresses an issue with a sporadic crash when using binning 4x4 with 16 bit cameras and also changes how the MSR error for magnitude estimation is reported within the Image Processing Module.

New in Astro IIDC 4.05.02 (Sep 4, 2009)

  • Addresses an issue where Astro IIDC 4.05.01 would not recognize some of the TIS cameras after sending the camera a Factory Reset command.
  • None of the six TIS cameras we have here for testing have this issue, but some models (likely a bug in certain versions of the camera firmware) for 4 customers do have it.

New in Astro IIDC 4.05.01 (Aug 13, 2009)

  • Addresses a bug where Astro IIDC 4.05.00 would prevent a FireWire 800 camera from transmitting frames, if and only if you were using a FireWire 800 to FireWire 400 cable or down converter.
  • If you were using a FireWire 400 camera with FireWire 400 cables or a FireWire 800 camera with FireWire 800 cables there is no problem.
  • We also added code to force the camera to reset to factory defaults at startup so that if any other software has configured the camera badly, it does not affect Astro IIDC. This may slow down the launch of Astro IIDC depending on the camera model and how fast it's CPU / FPGA operate at.

New in Astro IIDC 4.05.00 (Aug 10, 2009)

  • Adds the ability to record and graph the brightness of user defined areas.
  • Provides post 2x2 binning while stacking.
  • Adds overdrive packet sizes to maximize bandwidth usage over FireWire 800.
  • Improves recording speed for 220+ fps cameras.
  • Provides new example Apple scripts.
  • Provides improved guiding capability and addresses a few bugs.

New in Astro IIDC 4.04.00 (May 4, 2009)

  • Has an updated manual.
  • Adds support for using alternate GPIO Trigger pins.
  • Adds long exposure support for PGR Flea 2 G cameras.
  • Has separate preference files for each camera used.
  • Provides visual warning of saturated pixels and has finer incremental control for long exposures.

New in Astro IIDC 4.03.01 (Apr 9, 2009)

  • Simple and easy to use interface in a single camera control window as shown in the screen snap shot to the right. All camera control adjustments are done with a full size scrollable live preview image so there is none of this modal QuickTime tiny 160x120 pixel image approximations nonsense, pure WYSIWYG.
  • Works with most inexpensive monochrome or color FireWire web type cameras (see list at page bottom for details).
  • Works with most high end 640x480 to 4096x4096 size, 8 and 16 bit per pixel, monochrome or bayer color FireWire 400 and Firewire 800 cameras (see list at page bottom for details).
  • Utilizes ASC's industrial strength, preemptively multi threaded, Altivec / SSE3 enhanced IIDC/DCAM framework code, with no dependency on QuickTime or other FireWire drivers for camera control. "Astro IIDC" directly accesses the FireWire camera and extracts the raw bayer or monochrome CCD data. No YUV color aliasing as we decode the bayer color data using our own custom 2x2, 3x3 and 5x5 kernels.
  • For inexpensive FireWire cameras provides extended CCD exposure times from as fast as 1/3000th of a second down to 1.029 seconds, without any hardware modifications. That is 31 times more light gathering capability than anyone else's software and adds a new dimension for lower light imaging.
  • For high end FireWire cameras provides CCD exposure times from 1/10000 of a second to 60 minutes (depending on the camera), Region Of Interest and records movies as fast as 240 frames per second.
  • Supports user definable Average and Spot Color Balance, allowing you to balance against any color you want, not just white.
  • Single click to Grab a frame, Grab a user defined burst of frames and average them (for noise reduction) or Grab a burst of frames and sum them (for enhancing low light imaging). Supports frame grabs in TIFF (Mono8, Mono16, RGB24 or RGB48), PNG (8 or 16 bit), BMP, PhotoShop, PICT, JPEG and FITS (Mono8 or Mono16 bit) file formats.
  • Guiding Provides Auto Guiding on stars, planets, lunar craters and solar sunspots utilizing KeySpan's USB to Serial Port converter or Shoestring Astronomy's GPUSB ST4 converter for mount control. Supported mounts include Meade compatible (including LXD55, LXD75, ETX90, ETX125, LX200, RX400, SkySensor 2000 PC etc.), Losmady, Celestron, Meade, Temma, Vixen, SkyWatcher and other mounts that have a ST4 type Auto Guider port and hacked hand controllers (Orion EQ2/3, CGE5 etc.).
  • Supports Altivec / SSE3 enhanced Flat Frame division and Dark Frame subtraction to provide for real time removal of optical imperfections (i.e. dust, hairs, vignetting etc.) and to reduce CCD noise.
  • Provides live Sharpness estimators using pixel edge detection or FWHM / HFD for a focussing aid and can also be used to exclude air turbulence blurred images from being grabbed as frames or recorded in a movie.
  • Logs all your camera settings for every frame grabbed or movie recorded to a text file, so that you can easily recall exactly what settings were used when each image image was captured. Also allows you to enter user notes notes for each frame grabbed or movie recorded.
  • Records QuickTime Movies at frame rates up to 240 frames per second down to as slow as 1 frame per minute, user selectable. All movies are recorded with a Greenwich Mean Time relative Time Code track, so that the time for each recorded frame can be determined within 1 frame duration.
  • imageprocessing Provides a 16 bit LRGB64 bit Altivec optimized real time Image Processing Module, featuring multi radii spatially dependent sharpening, log square root curve stretching, RGB level adjustments, RGB gain adjustments, RGB Saturation, R and B color channel spatial offsets for atmospheric correction, multiple noise reduction algorithms and zoom.
  • Provides multi - threaded real time automated alignment and stacking of video, both for live image capture and post with recorded 8 or 16 bit per pixel movies. All Altivec enhanced stacking, sharpening, aligning and processing is done at a full 32 bits per color channel (Mono32 or RGB96) so that no image data is lost or compromised.
  • Allows you to automatically or manually select which frames are included for stacking. Provides up to 500 user selectable areas of interest for Multiple Area Processing.
  • Supports display and capture in color, monochrome, binned 2x2 color, binned 2x2 monochrome, binned 4x4 monochrome and individual red, green or blue color channels modes.
  • Support external hardware trigger modes 0 and 14, which allows you to externally trigger frame delivery to the monitor, for frame grabs and recording movies.
  • Saves and restores up to 10 user definable camera settings, so you can apply camera specific parameters at a key stroke or via an AppleScript.
  • Allows you to measure differential or absolute Photometric magnitudes and generate sub arc second Astrometric positional measurements on stellar objects from imported images or over time from movies. Now you can measure variables star brightness changes, identify positional changes of asteroids or comets and search for extra solar planets on your Mac.
  • Provides support for Digital SLR camera users to create RGB48 bit movies from their images, do dark frame subtraction, apply flat frame correction or stack and align your 16 bit movies.
  • Apple Script support for starting or stopping Video Play, starting or stopping Movie Recording, Grabbing Frames, Dark Frames, Flat Frames and programatically changes settings.

New in Astro IIDC 4.03.00 (Apr 4, 2009)

  • Fixed a bug where nudging a Selection area with up/down/left/right arrow keys does not recalculate and update the Pixel Variance value.
  • Fixed a bug where clicking on a the 128th or higher selection area would not find the object (signed char overflow).
  • The per frame pixel comparison code now checks to see how many equal minimum areas it finds. If it find more than 2 that match up but have different locations, it will report this selection as unmatched and not add this image to the stack. This should eliminate false positives when stacking frames.
  • The PixeLink B8xxx and B9xxx camera series do not support the Format 7 VALUE_SETTING Register anymore and will not work properly under Format properly 7. Their earlier cameras did support this and do work, but not their newer ones. Also the new ones do not support any form of bandwidth control either, so they will take use all bandwidth available on the FireWire bus. We do not recommend the PixeLink cameras anymore.
  • In the "Others" folder of the dmg installer are three Apple scripts named "Example All Commands Script", "RecordMultipleFrames Script" and "RecordMultipleMovies Script". The RecordMultipleMovies and RecordMultipleFrames can record multiple movies and frames over a time period automatically, and can be executed when guiding. You can customize them by changing the time durations.
  • Added Checkbox named "Histogram expand brightness of all frames used for pixel alignment." to the "Stacking Options.." window. What this does is apply a histogram stretch (using 0.5% low and 99.5% on the high end) to the frame used for alignment, which increases the brightness and contrast. This was specifically designed for cases where you have to under exposes the movie or you need to use the darker portions of the movie for finding good alignment features. It mainly should be used when trying to do MAP alignment for lunar terminator type images, as it will cause brightly lit areas to brighten up significantly. The effect this has will only be displayed when selecting pixel alignment areas.
  • When importing L R G B image alignments in Astro IIDC, we found that usually one or more of the RGB channels are excessively dark. So we added an automatic Histogram stretch (0.5% low to 99.5% High) to each of the imported channels to programatically brighten things up. This will make aligning dark images work a lot easier. Note this does not affect the resulting aligned RGB image, just the temporary color channel images used for alignment.
  • Added the pop up menu "Don't blend in a stack if # of frames drops below xxx of expected." to the "Stacking Options.." window. The pop up menu runs from 40% to 95% in 5% increments. If the number of frames that Astro IIDC uses when creating a stack drops below a certain number of frames, then Astro IIDC will not add this stack into the blended MAP image. For example let's say you use a selection of 80% and have picked 150 frames for stacking, so the minimum number of stack frames is 120. If Astro IIDC creates a stack that only has 100 matchable frames then this stack will not be included in the resulted MAP image because it falls below our acceptable cut off limit of 120. If the stack has 120 frames or higher it will be added in, but not otherwise. This is designed to prevent those situations where noise or turbulence causes a poor matching of a selection area, and when these low stack frame stacks are sharpened, you can easily pick it out from the background.
  • Added checkbox "Do not create individual Stack images, just the blended MAP image." which prevents the intermediate stack frames from being saved to disk. Note that this can result in no frames being stacked at all, especially if you have a high percentage for the "Dont' blend in a stack if # of frames drops below xxx of expected".
  • Changed most text file output so that we use Tab separator instead of commas, so that importing into spreadsheets is easier.
  • Added the "Images To Aligned Movie…" menu item to the "Processing" menu. This will allow you to to take a bunch (up to 1000) frames (jpeg, tiff, bmp, pict, psd etc.), import them and then Astro IIDC will align them all against the first frame and create a cropped uncompressed ARGB32 aligned movie from them. You can use the "Export Movie.." menu item in the Processing menu to recompress them into something more web friendly else (PhotoJpeg at High quality is a good codec choice for scrubbing). This handles simple cases for say planetary objects and will not work reliably if the main brightest object changes shape (don't try it with lunar eclipses) or radically changes brightness. You can use this to create movies showing planetary rotations, movements of moons, asteroid drift against a static star field and other similar things.
  • The universal version of Astro IIDC 4.03.00 has been compiled using the Leopard XCode 3.0 version of Apples compiler, which has more x86 options than previous versions. It's still as big a resource hog and pig slow when compiling as the Tiger 2.x compiler is (might be a bit slower actually), but it may generate slightly faster SSE3 x86 code. The legacy version of Astro IIDC built with CodeWarrior is still available, which supports G3 to G5 PowerPC Macs and OSX 10.3.9 to 10.5.6.

New in Astro IIDC 4.02.00 (Mar 2, 2009)

  • Adds support for Batch Differential Photometry so you can measure variable stars, eclipsing binary stars, Exoplanet transits or rotational brightness changes of asteroids and moons over time.
  • Improved speed of stacking and alignment.
  • Better feedback on pixel area selections.
  • Improved time code handling.
  • Improved MAP functionality.
  • Adds support for PGR Flea2 G series cameras.
  • Improved manual with more examples and fixes a few bugs too.

New in Astro IIDC 4.00.04 (May 17, 2008)

  • Removed all custom controls that used RegisterToolboxObjectClass() and replaced it and related code with HIObjectRegisterSubclass(). Apple has broken RegisterToolboxObjectClass() in 10.4.10 and higher (including 10.5.x) so either it only works once or it crashes when used a second time, as Apple does not properly dispose of the objects that get created. The only way to fix it is to replace the original code. This affected the display of Histogram in the Camera Controls window, the RA/Dec graphing Sheet Window and the List for Manually Selecting Frames.
  • Fixed a bug with stacking in our x86 code when the ""Reduce image noise when sharpening" option was used. The color channels were not being properly swapped for BGRA32 when calculating the gaussian blurred image.
  • Fixed an issue with the Manually Select Frames window would not change the status of the last list item when multiple items were shift selected.
  • Changed the Guiding Log output to record a lot more information, including vector movement times and all your current options used for guiding.
  • Fixed a bug where it the Guide camera was rotated perfectly at 90 or 270 degrees to the normal horizontal axis, then the direction motion vectors would be reversed to what they should have been.
  • Changed the "Up" , "Down" , "Left" and "Right" Guiding movement keys so that they send fewer commands when reversing directions. The "Stop" button now sends a single "Stop" command (#:Q#) for the LX Meade type scopes, instead of four separate stop axis movement commands.

New in Astro IIDC 4.00.03 (Apr 18, 2008)

  • Fixed a possible 4 byte memory leak with not disposing of a Universal Proc Ptr.
  • Replaced all CoreGraphics text drawing with old style ATSUI text drawing code. Calling CGContextSelectFont() was chewing up 67% of the total CPU cycles to draw each frame of video. So on a G4 PowerBook, displaying video at 30 fps was using using 55% of the CPU and now uses 23%, simply because CGContextSelectFont() had to be called each time a frame was displayed. Maybe Apple could bother to use Shark to profile their own Crappy CoreGraphics Code?
  • Added the "Legacy" folder to the disk image (.dmg) file which has a PowerPC only version of Astro IIDC and our Bayer Codec which runs on 10.3.x or higher and with G3, G4 and G5 Macs. It still requires QuickTime 7.0 or higher. Because it's built with Code Warrior, it is slightly faster on PowerPC than the XCode generated Universal Binary version, especially any the Altivec code which has a 30 to 100% improvement over Xcode. We have only tested it with 10.3.9 which is the last version of OSX 10.3.x that was released.

New in Astro IIDC 4.00.02 (Apr 2, 2008)

  • Version 4.00.02 removes a timer that expired the application on March 31, 2008.

New in Astro IIDC 4.00.01 (Mar 17, 2008)

  • Version 4.00.01 fixes x86 Endian issues with the movies created by "Frames to RGB48 Movie..", "Dark Frame Subtract Movie.." and "Flat Frame Correct Movie.." items under the "Processing" menu.