«iCCD has been written so that astrophotos can be collected on an Apple OS X computer with the Starlight Express line of CCD cameras.
The image processing routines in iCCD make use of the vImage image processing framework. The vImage routines are Velocity Engine (Altivec) aware for excellent performance on G4 and higher processors. These routines will still function on a G3 but not as quickly.
Currently, the image processing routines only work on 16 bit grayscale images. This is because I believe that it is best to work on each individual color and luminance frame separately. In fact you should do most of the processing on the luminance frame. I recombine each RGB and luminance frame in Adobe Photoshop after processing in iCCD.
The iCCD program is a multiple window package that will control the Starlight Express cameras and open FITS files on the macintosh, an added bonus if you don't have a ccd camera. It was written in Objective-C using Cocoa and the Xcode development environment. The screen shot to the right shows the iCCD program. It works with the mx7c, mx7, sxv-h9, and the sxv-h9c. In the latest release, the focusing routine was dramatically improved.»
