Getting rid of CCD warm pixels in final images

[Patrick Lau]

Dear everybody,

My STL-11000 is having quite a lot of warm pixels which cannot be removed by Maxim DL's bad pixel map as their values change. They can be successfully removed by Kernel Filter --> hot pixel (with threshold of 1%) though. I have add two lines to AcquireSupport.wsc to make the action automated.

    If (ExpType = 0) And _
            ((Util.Prefs.CameraPrefs.AutoCalibrate Or ForceCal) And Not ForPointing) Or _
            (Util.Prefs.CameraPrefs.AutoCalPointing And ForPointing) Then 
        buf = calImagesDir & "\dark" & Binning & ".fts"
        If FSO.FileExists(buf) Then 
            Call MaxIm.CalClear
            MaxIm.CalAddDark(buf)
            buf = calImagesDir & "\flat" & Binning & ".fts"
            If FSO.FileExists(buf) Then MaxIm.CalAddFlat(buf)
            buf = calImagesDir & "\bias" & Binning & ".fts"
            If FSO.FileExists(buf) Then MaxIm.CalAddBias(buf)
            MaxIm.CalScaleType = 1                              ' Auto-scale
            Call MaxIm.CalSet            
        End If


        Console.PrintLine "  Remove warm pixels by Kernel Filter"     ' This 2 lines are added by Patrick Lau to remove unreliable pixels in CCD
        Camera.Document.KernelFilter 5,1    


        Console.PrintLine "  Calibrating image..."
        Voice.Speak "Calibrating image."
        '
        ' For final images, save a copy of the uncalibrated file as RAW-<filename>
        '

This will only affect the light frames (RAW and calibrated), but not bias, dark or flat.

Hope fellows observers with less-than-perfect CCDs will find this small modification useful.

Clear skies!

Patrick Lau
Hong Kong

[Bob Denny]

Nice. I am going to move this to the ACP Add-Ons, Enhancements etc. section. THANK YOU!!!