Mater artium necessitas
This text appeared in a book that was published in 1519 by William Horman, the headmaster of Winchester and Eton, entitled ‘Vulgaria’. It was a book of aphorisms that the schoolboys had to learn by heart as part of their Latin studies.
It is obviously an ancient saying and it may be traceable back to Plato’s Republic.
We know it of course as ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’ and it is just as valid today as it was the day it was coined.
Recently I was doing some H-alpha solar imaging using a Coronado Solarmax II, 60, BF15 H-alpha scope mounted on a Celestron AVX mount, and a DMK 31AU03.AS mono CCD camera. AstroDMx Capture was used to capture the data.
It was my intention to capture 5000-frame SER files.
Click on an image to get a closer view.
Screenshot of AstroDMx Capture gathering solar data
However, an observant reader will notice that TIFF files were being captured, not a SER file as I had intended. I hadn’t taken care to make sure that I was capturing the type of files that I wanted. I didn’t realise until the imaging session was finished.
I wasn’t particularly worried because I intended to use Autostakkert! to stack the images, and Autostakkert! can load and stack image files as well as AVI and SER movie files.
I then found, to my disappointment, that Autostakkert! was unable to load more than 1000 image files, but I had 5000 files to stack. The same proved to be true for Registax.
It turns out that this is a hard-wired property of Windows! The operating systems Linux and macOS have no such limitation and they are not limited to loading up to 1000 images into an application.Using Wine to run Autostakkert! or Registax doesn’t help because the Windows limitation is carried over into Wine.
There is, however, a way around this, and Nicola started a new project that in a sense, ‘invents a new sort of wheel’ using the method overcoming the Windows limitation.
The project is called ‘ PTM ’ (Pictures to Movies)
At the moment, the project is in its infancy and can convert any number of Tiff files to a single SER file. No doubt the PTM GUI will change as the project proceeds, but at the moment it is relatively simple.
It is intended that the program will eventually be able to load TIFF, JPG, PNG or BMP images, and will be able to convert them to AVI or SER movie files. Where appropriate, PTM will also work with 16-bit data.
As it stands, I have found the software to be very useful for correcting the error described above. However, it is anticipated that there will be many other uses for PTM when it is completed and available for Windows, Linux and macOS.
Final image obtained from stacking the best 20% of frames in the 5000-frame SER file created by PTM from the individual TIFF files.
I shall post here when PTM is available for download.
