October APSIG Meeting

Hey APSIG gang! Please join us at the Timberglen Library Tuesday, October 7th from 6-8pm for our monthly APSIG meeting. There is a lot going on this month, so be sure to attend. We will discuss all of the subjects below at the meeting. First, I have asked Frank Castanho to take over as chairperson for the APSIG and he has accepted. Frank is an experienced deep sky imager in both narrow-band and RGB imaging. He has offered many suggestions for APSIG direction and topics. Please come and welcome Frank as our new chairperson. I am very grateful to Frank for accepting this responsibility. Second, Phillip Easton offered to coordinate an APSIG dark site imaging event. Phillip has been polling members and planning the timing and activities for this event. In case you missed his post on the APSIG forum on this topic, here are the plans that Phillip has put forward for the October 18th event. <QUOTE> If we can find a portable projector I think George and I will each do a short presentation (~45 mins). Max, would you be willing to hold a show and tell at your POD after? My thought is for an hour after the last presentation people could drop by, ask questions, etc. Might be really beneficial to any new imagers that come out. 3-4 Imaging Jupiter (working title) - George Hall 4-5 Cooling DLSR cameras - Phillip Easton 5-6 Show and Tell at Max's - Max Corneau Dave, would you be willing to set up and take down one of the club scopes with GOTO? I would like to make it available for the imagers visually view targets of interest or even maybe the target they are imaging. <UNQUOTE> Third, Frank Castanho suggested at our last meeting that we hold a series of "workshop" like meetings where we work as a group. We will be viewing image processing video tutorials and work as a group to develop hands-on experience implementing the image processing techniques covered in the tutorial. This first meeting will lay the ground work for the following meeting by assessing the image processing tutorial material available, assessing the software available in the group and interest in specific processing techniques and tools.   Frank has taken the initiative to contact Adam Block and get permission to use his video Tutorials and image data at our group meetings. I my opinion, these are the best image processing tutorials available and will be very informative to go through as a group. Below is a quote from Frank's e-mail to me on the subject: <QUOTE> I have obtained Adam Blocks Permission to use his Data and present some of his video Tutorials at the APSIG meeting. Adam Block has graciously agreed to allow APSIG to use his processing tutorials videos and image data for limited use during our meeting. The format of the meetings would consist of a multi-meeting sessions to process a selected image thought entire image processing flow. The Videos are broken down into 5-7 segments per image. Each meeting we would view a segment, about 45 minutes of video. Following the viewing of each video segment we will have a short group discussion about the techniques and method presented. Following the discussion wee would have a hands on group processing of the supplied image data. Feel free to bring your laptop and video processing software. While each participant may not have the software packages used in the tutorials, it would still be interesting to see the results members produce using different software packages using the concepts presented in the videos.  We will try to reserve about 15-20 minutes for show and tell so don't forget your images for Show & Tell. <UNQUOTE> Don't forget your images for show-n-tell! See you there! -George