The dark, bias and light frames that we took last night are all written in a file format called FITS, Flexible Image Transport System, which goes back to the 1980s. Talk about future-proofing. From what I understand, FITS files are literally sequences of largely plaintext, like a series of numbers telling the appropriate piece of software how bright a particular pixel is. However my image editing software does not understand this format. It's not a problem, however I want to be able to see what those images look like later on, in my own time, when I have to write up an activity's report.
A quick search on Google later, and I found an excellent freeware program (unfortunately) called Gimp, which will read FITS files. PhotoShop will apparently do it too, but my laptop doesn't have it.
So, having installed it, I loaded up one of the unprocessed raw images that we created last night in the telescope dome, and I got this magnificent set of three spectra, complete with dark absorption lines (showing the presence of certain types of ions and/or elements in the source of the light):
I'm very happy that I can see our images again, it means there won't be quite such a frantic rush back in Birmingham to commit everything to paper from memory, as I can just view the images. What I can't do on my own (yet) is to redo the data analysis, reduction, normalisation etc in Maxim DL, because I don't have it, nor do I wish to pay the £600 that it apparently costs. However Peter apparently has a fix for this, so I'll speak to him later today. It would be extremely useful to be able to redo the analysis in this way, especially as Gimp doesn't seem to want to play ball with any less dramatic image. But I'm working on this problem too.
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