OVERVIEW

Dramatically improve the quality of your images by increasing sharpness and resolution.

Collimate your telescope in-focus with your CCD camera or using a defocused star!

CCDInspector works with your camera acquisition software to allow real-time evaluation of images to determine collimation, camera tilt and focus. Make collimation adjustments with your CCD camera to an accuracy not available with eyepieces or manual collimation aids. Collimate refractors, reflectors and compound optics.

Batch analyze your images for sharpness and resolution

Astrophotograpers, CCD and digital camera users often take many shorter images to later process and stack to simulate one long exposure. To produce the highest quality image, it is important to eliminate from the stack sub-frames that are of lower quality than the rest. With CCDInspector, you’ll be able to quickly select the best frames of the batch by measuring the quality of each of the images.

Real-time monitoring of focus, guiding and seeing

CCDInspector is designed to work seamlessly with CCDSoft and MaxIm DL and other CCD camera control programs to provide these functions, along with a number of other useful tools to estimate seeing, image quality, tracking, and guiding performance.

Key Features:

  • Analyze frame illumination by measuring flat frames or star-field images
  • Predict how well a telescope will work with a different size camera, including FWHM, vignetting, and star distortions
  • Limit settings for automatic image evaluation and flagging
  • Includes CCDIS/P Plug-in (see below) for Effortless Image Registration in CCDStack
  • Collimate your telescope in-focus with your CCD camera
  • Generic support for all image capture software, including CCDSoft5, Maxim DL, AstroArt, MaxDSLR, etc., capable of writing FITS, TIFF, SBIG, or most native DSLR Raw file formats!
  • Dramatically Improve quality of your images: increase sharpness and resolution
  • Determine the quality of your atmospheric conditions with real-time conditions graphs
  • Automatically sort many images at once by evaluating star sharpness and tracking quality
  • Pick the best sub-frames for stacking, or for deciding which to keep
  • Compare images by many objective criteria, plot the results for a better visual impact
  • Measure and plot focus variations due to tilt or field curvature
  • Determine how flat the image plane is
  • Compare performance of field flatteners and focal reducers
  • Real-time focusing using Full-Width-at-Half-Maximum (FWHM), Peak Value, Half-Flux Diameter (HFD), and other displays.

CCDIS/P is a powerful plug-in for CCDStack to enable fast, precise, and effortless registration of images. Image scale, rotation, flipped axis, or large image offsets are all handled easily with no user input required. Average registration accuracy is better than 1/10 of a pixel. This plug-in is compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows and requires CCDStack version 1.4 or later.

CCDIS/P in action with CCDStack!