Product Description
This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Symposium "Computational Modeling of Objects Represented in Images. Fundamentals, Methods and Applications'', CompIMAGE 2010, held in Buffalo, NY, in May 2010. The 28 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 77 submissions. They are organized in topical sections on theoretical foundations of image analysis and processing; methods and applications on medical imaging, bioimaging, biometrics, and imaging in material sciences, as well as methods and applications on image reconstruction, computed tomography, and other applications. ... Read more

Product Description
Describes the appearance, activities, and life cycle of the Earth's source of light and heat. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Not actually worthwhile
This book wastes a whole lot of time.Who cares how the algorithms work??Wouldn't it be better just give a better explanation of when to actually use them(something the book doesn't really do).Also, if you use a DSLR, the software can't handle the images, because they are too large.

Save your money.

Image processing from a specific perspective
As others have mentioned, this is not a manual for the well-regarded AIP4WIN software. It is much more than that. It explains the theory behind the software in terms of the processing of astronomical images. In that respect you are going to run into much of the same material you would encounter in Gonzales and Woods' Digital Image Processing, just from a different perspective. It would probably be good if you already know the basics of image processing from a book like Gonzalez and Woods before reading this one. This book's primary aim is not explaining DIP, but explaining how it is used to perform the processing of astronomical images. The following is the table of contents of the book and each chapter's summary.

Basic imaging: How the light that falls on your CCD becomes an image. Covers image formation, cameras, telescopes, detectors, sensor geometry, image capture, field of view, and angluar coverage.

Counting Photons: "Astronomy is about counting photons...." Covers signal, noise, the signal-to-noise ratio, the Poisson and Gaussian distributions and why they matter, making better pictures by summing images, and how dark frames and flat frames effect the signal and noise in your images.

Digital Image Formats: Covers the file formats that astronomers use, including FITS, TIFF, BMP, and JPEG. Learn file format basics, how your image data is arranged inside the file on your computer's hard disk.

Imaging Tools: All about sensors, optics, cameras, and telescopes. Explains how to calculate the field of view and resolution of your system, telescope optics for imagers, auxiliary optics, mounts, drives, tracking, filters, and how to recognize and correct common equipment problems.

Imaging Techniques: Good equipment is just part of the story. Covers the techniques that experienced imagers use to obtain high-quality images. Includes polar alignment, good guiding, critical focus, correct exposure, darks and flats, light boxes, and special considerations for DSLR cameras.

Image Calibration: Examines the details of image calibration. All about bias, dark noise, flat-fielding, standard and scalable darks, cosmic rays, making master dark frames, flats, standard calibration protocols, and defect mapping and correction.

Image Analysis: Locked within the numerical values that make up a calibrated CCD image is a staggering amount of information. Covers pixel coordinates, pixel value, image statistics, the image histogram, feature analysis, the centroid, distances, and image profiles.

Measuring CCD Performance: How to measure the performance of your CCD camera. Discusses goals in measuring CCD performance, how to shoot test images, and the determination of bias level, dark current, gain, linearity, and readout noise.

Astrometry: Asteroid hunters measure the postions of new-found objects using astrometry. Covers the theory behind finding right ascension and declination from a CCD image, practical astrometry, and the uses of astrometry.

Photometry: Amateur observers now work side by side with professional astronomers to measure the variations of variable stars, supernovae, asteroids, and comets using the CCD to capture precise measures of brightness.

Spectroscopy: An emerging area for amateus astronomers brought to you by the CCD camera. Covers spectra and spectrographs, gratings, prisms, slit- and slitless systems, and the properties and meaning of stellar spectra.

Geometric Transforms: Covers translation, rotation, scaling, flipping, cropping, floating, and resampling. Demystifies the basic geometric operations used in astronomical image processing.

Point Operations: Learn how software converts the pixel values your CCD camera captures into the sparkling images you see in popular magazines and amateur websites. Remapping, transfer functions, linear, log, and exponential scalings explained. Covers endpoint specification and histogram specification.

Linear Operators: All about one of the most useful tools in the amateur astronomer's digital toolbox. Describes how digital convolution performs crispening, sharpening, smoothing. Learn about low-pass and high-pass kernels, Sobel, Kirsch, and Prewitt operators, and that most useful of linear tools: the unsharp mask.

Non-Linear Operators: Non-linear operators perform useful services like cleaning up noisy images. Cover rank-order processes, the median filter, local adaptive sharpening, noise filters, and morphological operators.

Image Operations: Multi-image operations are the basic tool for making superior astro-images. Covers image math, median-combine stacking, image registration, blinking, and track-and-stack image summing.

Images in Frequency Space: Unlocks the mysteries of the Fourier Transform and image processing in the spatial frequency domain. These powerful techniques used by profession astronomers are now accessible to amateurs

Wavelets: Explores the hottest new image processing and restoration techniques. Covers the wavelet transform, the inverse wavelet transform, spatial filtering, the wavelet noise filter, and iterative filtering techniques.

Deconvolution: Deconvolution attempts to restore images degraded by a turbulent atmosphere, poor telescope optics, and tracking errors. Discusses algorithms used to sharpen Hubble Space Telescope images, how they work, and how amateurs can use them.

Building Color Images: You've seen fantastic astro-images on the web and in popular magazines and books. Learn how astronomers capture and build color images from multiple exposures through different color filters. Covers the colors of astronomical objects, luminace, chrominance, color space, white balance, G2V stars, RGB and LRGB color image capture.

Processing Color Images: The digital SLR camera has done much to bring color imaging to the average amateur astronomer. Explains the Bayer array, color image bit depth, noise, dark current, vignetting, calibration, image stacking, and luminace enhancement techniques

The bible for taking astrophotography shots
The book DOES NOT tell you how to operate the software that comes with it, it's more of a bible for ANY type astrophotography which happens to include the best darn software for image processing you could find. Just don't confuse the two.Even if you have image processing software now you NEED this book!

Amazing value
I participated in a beta test of the photometry software program and proof-read a draft of this excellent book. The book alone is worth the price, but the amazing value is the powerful software package included, AIP4WIN. It does so many image processing tasks- photometry, astrometry, spectroscopy, color pictures, image sharpening - with several deconvolution routines. This is much more than a toy (but you certainly can have fun with it) as it supports routine image processing of hundreds of images per night. The software alone is worth several times the price of the book. Anyone interested in putting a CCD camera to serious work - or serious fun - will certainly get their money's worth with this package! Berry and Burnell have a really excellent effort here. ... Read more

Product Description

The book enables you to peer deeply into the wonders of the Universe in full color with unprecedented clarity and resolution

Only Hubble Heritage picture book endorsed by the two leading space agencies, NASA and ESA

Close-up photos within book are unmatched in competing texts, because the images have been prepared straight from the data by scientists to reach the highest possible quality

Customer Reviews (11)

Hubble
I really enjoyed reading it-was impressed with the photos, too--I showed it to my daughter, who was impressed with the photos also.

breathtaking photos
If you are interested in cosmology, the universe, space, or astrophysics, this book is a must.The photos are mindboggling.Regardless of where you stand on topics like evolution, the creation of the universe, etc., this book with its incredible photos will expand your perspectives.

Great book!
This book is all it was advertised to be; like brand new - great buy!

I bought it for a gift & the recipient loved it.

Great Coffee Table Book
Bought the book used for about 20% of the cover price - the one I received looked untouched.

It's a nice book for coffee tables, easy bed-time browsing, etc.The text is fairly shallow regarding astronomy and Hubble, but definately interesting.I would not consider a reference text.The book does provide some basic information on the subjects presented, but it is, after all, primarily a picture book.The selection of photos is good and the quality of the printing excellent.Only wish the book was larger (but would probably say that no matter how large it was).

I was drawn to the book after downloading numerous fascinating Hubble photos from hubblesite.org - I wanted to learn more about the subjects of the photos and also have something handy to point to when discussing astronomy with friends.The book, so far, has been OK at the first and very good at the latter.Quite happy with this purchase.

Hubble review
The pictures are stunning, as one would expect.The naritive is pretty good but a bit basic.Not only is it a good coffee table book it is a nice reference book to have on the shelf. ... Read more

Product Description
“Dozens of short essays, each prompted by one of science’s visual creations . . . beautiful.”—George Johnson, New York Times Book ReviewWe live in a visual age—an age of images; iconic, instant, and influential. In this remarkable book, John D. Barrow traces their history in order to tell the story of modern science.

Some images, such as Robert Hooke’s first microscopic views of the natural world or the stunning images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, were made possible by our new technical capabilities. Others, such as the first graph, were breathtakingly simple but perennially useful. Many of these images have shattered our preconceptions about the limits and nature of existence, and together they reveal something of the beauty and truth of the universe, and why, so often, a picture is better than a thousand words. 190 illustrations ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Cosmic Images, Mental Gymnastics
Suppose one's task is to review Finnegan's Wake.Daunting?I approached thistask with a lesser version of that trepidation.Cosmic Imagery, as may be inferred solely from the titles of Barrow's other works, is conceived on a preternaturally broad canvas.

Accordingly, budget a generous space on the coffee table for this project, and an equally generous portion of time -- and not leisure time.

Advice to readers might well include:

* Read with a netbook nearby. You may need some Wikipedia refreshers to catch up on science concepts that you have forgotten or neglected in your science education.

* Prepare for a roller coaster ride across disparate specializations -- not just cosmology and astronomy, as the Cosmic's title implies -- but historical footnotes like the "anthropocentric piece of interstellar advertising" affixed to the Pioneer 10 Jupiter probe in 1972, drawings of flying saucers from science fiction comic artists like Alex Schomburg,and the frozen geometry of self-taught, snowflake-obsessed Wilson Bentley.

* While Barrow's preface argues that pictures "save words . . . change the pace, alter the style and make things more memorable," in fact you'll have to do much more than simply stare at the ponderable images in his collection. The images sometimes require painstaking explanations -- painstaking, because Barrow wants to avoid being sidelined by the underlying science.Laudable, but probably an impossible ambition.

* As with any good coffee table book, Cosmic Imagery can be opened to any chapter at random. Open to "Stepping Out: Laetoli Footprints"(p. 223) and you'll be treated to a line of hominid footprints left in Tanzania 3.6 million years ago.In "Two Easy Pieces: Aperiodic Tilings" (p. 397), a gallery of Islamic tilings is presented in tribute to an"almost overwhelming" exploration of "symmetry and periodicity."

To enjoy Barrow's work, an extended sitting may not be suitable.His museum of artifacts from the history of science (subtitle: "key images in the history of science") calls for a dizzying tour of divergent corridors and anterooms.Better to let the collection rattle around in the skull, as surely it did in Barrow's. How else could one explain Chapter 19, "Shapeliness: The Symmetries of Life" (p. 255), which begins with a quotation, as does every chapter:

He had the sort of face that, once seen,
is never remembered.

- Oscar Wilde

The image is Leonardo's Vitruvian Man from 1490.A tribute to symmetry -- yes, but Barrow doesn't leave it there.After remarking on the remarkable evolution of right-left symmetry in biological systems, he wryly observes that

The most interesting feature of the high degree of symmetry found in human faces and our external bodies is the contrast with the squalid muddle to be found under the skin. our bodies are not symmetrically engineered under the surface. Hearts are on the left, our brains are laid out in an asymmetrical fashion. . .

But there's more.Hypercubes, the normal distribution, the periodic table -- science-haters will begrudgingly admit and be fatigued by Barrow's restless quest for images that inspire.The book is effort, and coffee tables will bow as if the book was ten times its weight. But Barrow's work is it itself inspired, not by coincidence quoting from a great seer who got science wrong but understood its fearsome symmetry:

To see a World in a Grain ofSand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

-William Blake

Cosmic Imagery succeeds to such an extent that the music its visual/verbal modalities lack can be heard rising up from the covers when the book is set down.It is a small achievement about the grand achievements of others, which is itself a kind of perfect symmetry. ... Read more