Introduction to Lynkeos

What is it ?

Lynkeos is a Cocoa® application dedicated to the processing of astronomical digital images taken through a telescope.
It is a "Universal binary" running natively on PowerPC and Intel Macintoshes. It is optimized for vectorized instructions sets (Altivec or SSE), multi-processor and multi-core machines.

Where does that weird name comes from ?

Lynkeos was one of the argonauts, the Jason's fellows who sailed on the Argo ship, seeking the golden fleece.
Lynkeos was surnaturally keen sighted, hence the name of this software, hoping that this sponsorship will help it giving surnatural results

It is to be noticed that the Argo ship sails the skies as the Carina, Puppis and Vela constellations ; among the argonauts were Castor and Pollux : the "Gemini" and Hercules. At last, Lynkeos himself roams the skies as the Lynx constellation.

How does it works ?

By stacking the best images, the signal to noise ratio is increased and details lost in the noise of individual images become visible in the resulting image.

This software accepts, as input, QuickTime® sequences, still images, in any image format supported by Cocoa®, and also digital cameras RAW format.
It generates a 16 bits RGB TIFF image as output, to be further processed with some all-purpose image processing application.
Depending on optional packages installation, it can additionaly open AVI and MPEG sequences or FITS images ; and save the result as a FITS file.

The steps to process a collection of images are :

• collect the movies and/or pictures,
• collect calibration movies and/or pictures (ie: dark frames and flat fields, this is optional),
• align the images,
• select the best images,
• stack the selected ones,
• process the resulting image.