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Development of a Real-Time Automated Image Enhancement Pipeline for NASA's IRTF and Other Users
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| The goal of this project is to develop an automated pipeline to perform PIXON image reconstruction on images from NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) with minimal interaction from the
observer. Preliminary work with the Spacewatch data set has overcome many of the challenges facing such a pipeline, such as automated characterization of background and sky noise, automated
extraction of PSFs, and automated identification of non-stellar objects such as galaxies or cosmic ray hits. Several images from the IRTF's recently commissioned SpeX guider camera have been PIXON-processed with extremely promising results.
Based on the early results with SpeX images, we expect to deliver diffraction-limited spatial resolution across the entire 0.85 to .5 micron range of the instrument. The addition of real-time
PIXON processing to the IRTF will open new avenues of research. Eventually enhanced images produced by this pipeline will become an expected benefit of observing with the IRTF. We will concentrate a significant part of our effort on making the pipeline robust and easy to use to aid its adoption by amateurs and other large telescopes. |
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