(meteorobs) OT -Linux & Python mask building for Meteors & furballs.

[Chris Peterson]

I'd advise against using Paint to do this- it's probably the most difficult 
way. The program is primitive by any standards. Nearly any proper graphics 
application (Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, GIMP, etc) will allow you to draw a 
selection border of arbitrary shape. With any of these apps, you simply use 
a grabbed image from the camera, trace your local horizon, fill with white, 
invert the selection, fill with black. That's it... a couple of minutes any 
you have your horizon mask. The procedure is described graphically in 
http://www.cloudbait.com/projects/allsky_manual.pdf (a different camera 
system, but exactly the same type of masking).

Chris

*****************************************
Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "stange" <stange34 at sbcglobal.net>
To: <meteorobs at meteorobs.org>
Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2008 2:40 PM
Subject: (meteorobs) OT -Linux & Python mask building for Meteors & 
furballs.


> Thanking Ed Majden for the information, I have created the steps (I use) 
> to
> make a precision mask for all-sky camera's. Granted my way is labor
> intensive... but it does yield a superior permanent mask for both Linux 
> and
> Python Sentinel users. Short cuts steps can be utilized but at the expense
> of precision and neatness in my opinion. Of course if you change the
> rotation of your camera after making the mask you either re-do the mask or
> re-align the camera back to its original aiming so that the mask and the
> camera are co-aligned.
>
> Instructions with photo's can be downloade and opened as a .rtf file or
> saved to disk. This instruciton file WITH PHOTOS is 19mb. and download 
> time
> from my website is 1 1/2 minutes even with DSL. Sorry.....it only took 4
> hours to make it. :-)  -YCSentinel
>
>  http://www.geocities.com/stange34@sbcglobal.net/maskbuild_e.rtf