Astro
Images
by Mike Otis
All about Flashing. Maybe it's before your time, circa 1970s. We took spectroscopic film and treated it, with baking, or hydrogenating it in forming gas, or flashing it by exposing the film to low level light. We bought kits available from LUMICON.
During 1993,I invented a different kind of flashing, by exposing an active CCD sensor (SBIG ST4) to low level light. For the first time, itallowed remarkable images with ultra
by Mike Otis
All about Flashing. Maybe it's before your time, circa 1970s. We took spectroscopic film and treated it, with baking, or hydrogenating it in forming gas, or flashing it by exposing the film to low level light. We bought kits available from LUMICON.
During 1993,I invented a different kind of flashing, by exposing an active CCD sensor (SBIG ST4) to low level light. For the first time, itallowed remarkable images with ultra
short exposure times. My paper was published in Observatory Techniques Magazine, Fall 1993, Issue #7. As that issue is rare and out of print, the entire article is reproduced from my personal collection (see photos).
In 2020, I invented another kind of flashing, again - this time, with computer image processing. Recently while experimenting with astro image processing on images of deep sky with only a few seconds exposure, I repeated the process of flashing, by putting a low level baseline across the image. Originally intended as a trial way to shoot in bad light pollution, extract images and improve the results, the side effect was to improve the image in a similar manner as the other two methods of flashing. Results are preliminary, but it does show there are ways to take exposures of a few seconds through light pollution and extract images.
