iraf.net

Are the "photogenic" multicolored pictures created in iraf? Or do people just go to external software like photoshop or gimp for that?

Some of each: Basic CCD reductions, cosmic ray removal, image registration and such are done with things like IRAF, but the pretty-picture things like color balance and visual manipulation are done in PhotoShop/GIMP-like tools.A very basic form of color combination can be done in IRAF using the EXPORT task to combine e.g. RGB images into a color GIF (see the help page examples for details), but these usually aren't going to be press-release type images.-Mike

thanks mike
I understand the cosmic ray removel/processing stuff i was just wondering about the multi-filter combining. Thanks for the quick reply-i'll look to photoshop.Justin

The Aladin software from CDS can do this.http://aladin.u-strasbg.fr/aladin.gml

---

SDSU - Astronomy - Mount Laguna Observatory Superintendent

Just as a first look you can use ds9 -rgb to overlay different filtered images and give them false colors.

Just to complete the thread, see also astro-ph/0412138v1 entitled"Image-Processing Techniques for the Creation of Presentation-Quality Astronomical Images" by Rector et al. You can google the astro-ph number for a direct link to the paper.

[quote:fbd3898016="fitz"]Just to complete the thread, see also astro-ph/0412138v1 entitled"Image-Processing Techniques for the Creation of Presentation-Quality Astronomical Images" by Rector et al. You can google the astro-ph number for a direct link to the paper.[/quote:fbd3898016]Woah. Great paper. Thanks. It took me quite a bit to come up with the way that I use to generate color images but it only works with 3 images. This way allows up to 8.

Thanks everyone- very helpful.That paper is great!