AstroImageBrowser

Engineering and ArtWork:
Rod

Concept:
Rod and Darryl

Warm Thanks:
Darryl, Bob, Lachlan and Kelan.

Short Description:
AstroImageBrowser is a flexible and powerful front end to Digitized Sky Survey (DSS) internet database of astronomical images for MacOS X 10.3 or greater and is distributed as shareware. Images of astronomical objects in any part of the sky can be downloaded, manipulated, overlayed (with a grid, camera/CCD geometries, object labels or other pictures), converted, scaled, colorized, annotated, blinked, saved, cached and printed. AstroImageBrowser is particularly useful as an astrophotography planning tool but can equally well be used to explore or browse astronomical objects. After you have planned and taken your picture you can use AstroImageBrowser to superimpose it on the DSS image. People interested in Astronomy should find AstroImageBrowser useful and fun even if they don't have a telescope.

Long Description:
AstroImageBrowser can be used to browse photographic plates of the night sky by accessing the Digitized Sky Survey (DSS) internet database.  You can obtained highly faithful representations of star fields and deep space objects (DSO) as seen though any telescope/camera/eyepiece combination.  You can preview the field of view of any commercially available image system for any object in the heavens defined through NGC, IC and Messier Catalogs (AstroImageBrowser has an internal database of over 13,000 entries) or through Right Ascension and Declination (RA/Dec) coordinates.
 
AstroImageBrowser simplifies planning of astrophotography and astronomical observing particularly when using SBIG style CCD cameras, Digital SLRs, modified webcams and even visual work using eyepieces.  It relies on the brilliant Digitized Sky Survey and NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) but requires an internet connection.  Images can be cached for offline viewing and review.  The caching system saves redownloading the images from the internet which can be slow.  The cache images can be compressed to save disk space also.

AstroImageBrowser permits you to save downloaded images in a multitude of image formats, and also to print and save images with overlays.  Currently these overlays include: 1) Camera field of view overlays for CCD cameras, webcams, etc; 2) RA/Dec grid - these are curvilinear due to the subtle image distortions in the DSS image plates; 3) NGC, IC and Messier object labels; and 4) picture overlays such as your own telescope astrophots.  Further, the original black and white DSS images can be colorized in an infinite variety of ways, as can the overlays each be colorized with varying degrees of transparency using the full potency of Cocoa/Core Graphics.  The color schemes can be saved as color skins files. Picture overlays and the affine transformation (used to register them to a given DSS image) can be also saved.

Digitized Sky Survey (DSS) images are currently restricted to a square degree, 60 arcmin by 60 arcmin, so that very wide field previews are not supported.  At the highest resolution these square degree images are over 12 Megapixels in size and are more than enough for all but a few very extended celestial objects (as in over four times the size of the Moon).

There are other generally not serious limitations of the Digitized Sky Survey (DSS) including but not limited to: availability of the server, delays in generating the image data at the server (these images are created at the server as portions of huge plate images), availability of surveys, and image artefacts (satellite tracks, photographic plate defects and edge of image plate defects).  

Acknowledgements:
The Digitized Sky Surveys were produced at the Space Telescope Science Institute under U.S. Government grant NAG W-2166. The images of these surveys are based on photographic data obtained using the Oschin Schmidt Telescope on Palomar Mountain and the UK Schmidt Telescope. The plates were processed into the present compressed digital form with the permission of these institutions.
The National Geographic Society - Palomar Observatory Sky Atlas (POSS-I) was made by the California Institute of Technology with grants from the National Geographic Society.
The Second Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-II) was made by the California Institute of Technology with funds from the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the Sloan Foundation, the Samuel Oschin Foundation, and the Eastman Kodak Corporation.
The Oschin Schmidt Telescope is operated by the California Institute of Technology and Palomar Observatory.
The UK Schmidt Telescope was operated by the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, with funding from the UK Science and Engineering Research Council (later the UK Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council), until 1988 June, and thereafter by the Anglo-Australian Observatory. The blue plates of the southern Sky Atlas and its Equatorial Extension (together known as the SERC-J), as well as the Equatorial Red (ER), and the Second Epoch [red] Survey (SES) were all taken with the UK Schmidt.
All data are subject to the copyright given in the copyright summary. Copyright information specific to individual plates is provided in the downloaded FITS headers.
Supplemental funding for sky-survey work at the ST ScI is provided by the European Southern Observatory.
AstroImageBrowser made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.