Jim Burnell has been an eyeball astronomer for most of his 51 years. In
the mid 1980's, while a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories, he became
fascinated with the images being made available over the fledgling Internet from the NASA
space probes and major observatories. He started taking his own images soon after,
using a venerable Nikon F and hypered film, but, like many, found it frustrating to have
to wait to see the results, or even just to know if the object was in focus. In the early
1990's he ran into Richard Berry at Stellafane, and found the answer to his dilemma in the
technology of CCDs. His technical background (BSEE, MSEE) served him well as he
started building his own CCD cameras. Early on he determined that the image processing
software then available was difficult to use and severely lacking in power, so he
teamed up with Richard Berry to write the Astronomical Image Processing for Windows (AIP4Win)
software package which accompanies their book The Handbook of Astronomical
Image Processing, now in its second edition.
Today, Jim spends every clear night imaging from his backyard
observatory in Warwick, NY. He travels extensively (and internationally) to speak on astronomical
imaging and image processing and related subjects. His images and articles have been
published in periodicals around the world, and his software is in use by many thousands of
amateur astronomers as well as university students, who use his book as a textbook.
Cameras-
SBIG STL11000M
- Starlight Xpress SXV-H9 CCD with SBIG CFW10 filter wheel
Telescopes-
Losmandy Titan and G-ll mounts
- Tele Vue NP127is
- NP101 & TV60is
- Vixen R200SS & VC200L
- Celestron C8 (rarely used much anymore)
Software- CCDSoft and MaxImDL/CCD for the STL11000M
- AstroArt for the SXV-H9.
- All image processing performed exclusively in AIP4Win
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