Software and Tips for Astrophotography?

Neotrantor asks: "I'm a college student in an advanced astronomy class and i need to find out how nasa compiles all their little pictures into those big pretty ones like the hubble deep field. does anyone know what software they use or where i could find it. furthermore, is it an operation that any kind of workstation (sparc, alpha, x86, g4) when left on and trashing for a while, could get the job done?" As I understand it, Picture Window (and the Professional version) have become valued tools in the amateur astrophotography world, what other pieces of software would aspiring Astrophotographers find useful in their toolkits? What other tips and trickscan you use to produce stunning visuals of the sky?

IRAF

[RCO]

We always used IRAF for analyzing the images that we had. It would allow you to put different filters etc. on the images, and overlay them but I couldn't tell you what it is capable of at this point. IRAF runs under various UNIX flavours, but I don't think there is a version for windows at this point. You can look at this site for more information;
http://iraf.noao.edu/iraf-homepage.h tml

later

An Example Is Always Helpful...

[routerwhore]

Under the "Full WFPC2 Mosaic" Heading [stsci.edu]

Astro software sites:

[mockojumbie]

NASA's main software page:
http://asds.stsci.edu/packages.html [stsci.edu]

QCUIAG has links to some excellent software, some free, some not:
http://www.qcuiag.co.uk [qcuiag.co.uk]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/QCUIAG [yahoo.com]

A new method used by STSI and others:
http://www.pixon.com/brochure.html [pixon.com]

A HUGE collection of links:
http://www.r-clarke.org.uk/astrosoft1.htm [r-clarke.org.uk]

My own astro pages 8^)
http://rjs.org/astro [rjs.org]

IDL

[teridon]

I'm not an astronomer, but I sit near some! :)

AFAICT, serious image manipulation/analyzation is done with IDL. Check out The IDL Astronomy User's Library [nasa.gov].

Re:Hubble deep field is a single image

[spinkham]

Actually, it is the output of 4 different ccds which take pictures of overlapping areas that are stitched togeather, often by hand for nicer pictures they put out. There was an article on the cameras and image processing (focusing on color but also covering this) in a recent sky&telescope, and there's also good information here: http://hubblesite.org/sci.d.tech/behind_the_pictur es/wacky_shape/index.shtml [hubblesite.org]