Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!aries!mcdonald
From: mcdonald@aries.uiuc.edu (Doug McDonald)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: Re: Scientific Visualization again
Message-ID: <1989Nov27.024857.9480@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 27 Nov 89 02:48:57 GMT
References: <11726@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <1989Nov25.142552.1702@hellgate.utah.edu> <3399@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU> <5646@eos.UUCP>
Sender: news@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (News)
Reply-To: mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu (Doug McDonald)
Organization: School of Chemical Sciences, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Lines: 39

In article <5646@eos.UUCP> eugene@eos.UUCP (Eugene Miya) writes:
>It is EXTREMELY
>important to make a distinction between the researchy, prototypical,
>quick view versus the flashy presentation graphics which come out from
>certain supercomputer centers.

>Another gross generalization from
>
>--eugene miya, NASA Ames Research Center, eugene@aurora.arc.nasa.gov

Well, I have a specific scientific graphics problem that left our
NCSA helpless - they have nothing to help me. (In actual fact this
arises from my hobby - but that matters not at all.)

I have a pile of negatives of a couple of astronomical objects
that I have made with my telescope. The present ones are made identically,
except that a few have been made through clear glass plates. In the
future I want to use filters. I want to combine these on a computer.
The ultimate goal is to make pictures by combining photos made
through narrow band filters (where I observe there is no power for a CCD,
so I will use a nice image tube I already have.)

So I have these 35 millimeter negatives (black and white usually,
but some might be color). How do I get the data into a computer?
I need a minimum of 256 gray levels, 1024 would be more than enough.
There is enough resolution to need 2048x2048 pixels. Nobody 
around here seems to have any device to do this. I can, and have,
printed the negatives and run them through an Apple scanner on a Mac II,
but the software only uses 16 gray levels, though it has enough resolution.
But actually using prints is a bad idea due to image distortion -
I need to be able to add together various frames for signal to noise
enhancement. 

Can anyone recommend something that will do this digitization, preferably
something reasonably cheap? I would prefer to connect the thing to 
an IBM PC though a Silicon Graphics Iris 4 would do (I have to pay 
through the nose for the Iris).

Doug McDonald (mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu)