Amita wrote: > I took the negatives and the contact sheet to a > third lab tonight, and the guy looked at the > negative with some sort of machine and said that > the machine wouldn't be able to make the prints.... [Snip....]
> Is there a lab anyone could recommend for this sort > of work? Hi Amita, You might want to check the classified ads in the back of any recent issue of Sky & Telescope. There are labs that advertise as specialists in handling development and printing of astrophotographic exposures. I'm pretty bummed out about my Leonid results. I was able to capture some startrails, but I didn't notice any meteor trails on any of the few exposures I made. I observed lots of meteors where the camera was pointing during the morning of the 18th, and I'd have thought I would have captured some photons at the focal plane. I think the problem may have simply been too slow a combination of aperture and emulsion (28mm f/3.5 and 400-speed print film). The mini-lab didn't print any of my astro exposures. I scanned the negatives on my flatbed. The raw images looked like crap with a lot of light fall-off at the edges and a lot of fog in the center. However, I played around with making a darkfield frame to do background subtraction on the raw scans. (A recent S&T article describes how to do this.) After background subtraction, the images looked quite uniform, and the startrails actually looked pretty good. So it wasn't a total loss. Good luck with the prints. Bill Peifer Rochester, NY [demime removed a uuencoded section named winmail.dat which was 71 lines] - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
