For many years astronomical images from the world’s telescopes were reserved for an elite of astronomers and technical people. Now anyone with a desktop computer running Adobe Photoshop software can try their hand at crafting astronomical images as beautiful as those from the Hubble Space Telescope. A free software plug-in, released today, makes a treasure trove of archival astronomical images and spectra from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-ray observatory, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and many other famous telescopes accessible to home astronomy enthusiasts.
I am a big fan of the HST and of cosmological science in general. This is definitely one of the cooler things I’ve seen since the Mars rover software that was made available prior to the landings.
What in the heck are you talking about Lundy? Can you not read? Sheeesh…
"…The ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator works on Windows PCs and Macs (OS X 10.2+) and is optimised for Photoshop CS, but also works in Photoshop 7.0 (only 15 bit support) and Photoshop Elements 2 (only 8 bit support)."
Not only does Classic live but it starts up quickly and causes no hit at all (that i can perceive) to OSX.
This means that you can still run a copy of Photoshop 7.0.1 in Classic to use any of your legacy plug-ins when needed; and can continue to run invaluable older applications like Live Picture and Fontographer.
Incidentally, I was so excited to see the reference to "FITS Liberator". Yippee — a plug in which will allow me to directly open LP FITS files in Photoshop CS?
Wrong. A different kind of FITS apparently. Never mind, "FITS Liberator" will be loads of fun anyway.
What the heck are YOU talking about, Phosphor? This is the Mac forum. Never mind, Phosphor is one of my unindicted coconspirator critics from the pot addled and Anti-American Lounge. He would take issue with anything I said. Correct me if I’m wrong. In other news, the forums would not load earlier today, and at the present time are very slow.
"This means that you can still run a copy of Photoshop 7.0.1 in Classic to use any of your legacy plug-ins when needed; and can continue to run invaluable older applications like Live Picture and Fontographer."
As you might have been able to tell (or not, depending on how you interpret the SmiliCons), I was just crackin’ wise with Ramón…who now may just have replaced you, Ann, as the most reluctant-to-adopt-OS X forum visitor. Shoot, you even beat ME to OS X, Ann. Now, though, I’m fully appreciative of how much better it is than OS 9.
Having said that, though, I still open Photoshop (7.0.1, natch) in OS 9.2.2, because of legacy plugins. And many other apps as well, like Illustrator 8 and TypeStyler. So I haven’t totally left it behind. When I need it the Classic Environment runs with nary a hiccup, just as OS 9.2.2 did for me before I got on the Panther train.
"Incidentally, I was so excited to see the reference to "FITS Liberator".
Yippee — a plug in which will allow me to directly open LP FITS files in Photoshop CS?
Wrong. A different kind of FITS apparently. Never mind, "FITS Liberator" will be loads of fun anyway."
Yeah, I thought it was the same file format as well when I first read about it awhile back. Chris Cox set me straight on the fact that they were different, but I can’t remember how, exactly. Might be educational to find out again. You have a good point, though. L.P. FITS files should directly openablesomehowin modern-day Photoshop.
What did you put in your tea today? You’re making no sense at all.
First, Lundy said that the FITS plugin-was available only for OS X, and he was and is 100% correct within the framework of this Photoshop Macintosh forum.
Then you accused him of not reading properly, and you were and are 100% wrong, even your quote proves you are wrong.
Then I give you an honorable out by facetiously suggesting you must have been referring to Windoze, and you counter by typing some barely intelligible gobbledygook about Classic being dead and about a "King Steve".
In this regard, first of all I have no respect for kings or queens. Much less for Steve Jobs. The anachronistic support of the repugnant institution of the monarchy is one of the things for which I feel truly sorry for the British; only their cooking and their beer is worse (with sincere apologies to the sizable British contingent on this forum).
Second of all, Classic is not dead, what is dead is all further development of Mac OS 9.x applications. Perhaps you don’t quite grasp it, but the Classic environment and Mac OS 9.x are two entirely different things, even though Classic uses some of the same components OS 9.x does, but not nearly all.
Third of all, so far none of the new Macs, including the latest G5, fail to support Classic. Classic is, therefore, hardly dead.
Finally, I’ve been on Panther for a while. I reluctantly bought a new machine in order to be able to run Photoshop 8 and still be able to boot into straight, native 9.2.2 when I need to –and that I do. Very often, daily.
It looks like you’re the one that can’t read any more.
Lundy would have been more properly correct had he said "Sorry Classic OS fans, instead of "Sorry Hubble fans". Some folks read both forums, and a Windows user, stumbling upon his declaration, might be mislead by what he typed if they’re just skimming. It’s apparent that I was able to misinterprret what his brief statemennt was meant to imply, and I’m hardly your garden variety illiterate dunce.
Your bit about non respecting Kings, Qeens, Brit food and beer, blah, blah, whatever was out of left field as well.
Cripes, Ramón…did you miss my SmiliCons as well?
As for you and OS X…I had forgotten that you were using it at all. I thought you were still holding out.
The British Monarchy has a number of huge advantages which, as a foreigner, you can’t be expected to understand but stability, for a fraction of the cost of maintaining an American President, is one of them!
What few seem to know is that at the beginning of this reign, the Queen handed over the Crown’s revenue to the government and Royal expenses are paid out of just a portion of that revenue. In other words, maintenance of the British Head of State is not being met from taxation — it pays for itself.
As for English cooking you should know better than to eat in restaurants that are not listed in "The Good Food Guide".
Regarding beer, I wouldn’t know because I can’t stand even the smell of ANY variety, but most connoisseurs find the canned brews here to be rather wimpy.
It’s not a bad idea to be better informed before casting aspersions — particularly at the institutions of America’s last remaining ally!
Thanks for the love note, Phosphor. Apparently English isn’t your first language, maybe that’s why you dislike the Brit form of government . But enough about you, I have important news: Bobby Brown was fined 2000 dollars today for hitting his wife, Whitney Houston. The judge and prosecutors offered Mr Brown a suspension of the fine if he promised to to do it again as soon as he got home.
The easiest one first: the cuisine of any country is hardly measured by the quality of a few fine restaurants mostly run by foreigners. It’s what people eat at home that I have in mind, or what you are served in small restaurants in the countryside, say in a small town such as Aylesbury.
While I have very fond memories of the fine hospitality offered me by some of the finest old English families in the area while visiting my closest buddy in Stoke Mandeville, a wonderful German youth turned into a paraplegic by a voodoo love potion slipped into his drink by his girl friend in the Caribbean, remembering the food is not a pleasant thought. London restaurants in the 1960s, including the Savoy’s (in)famous roast beef, were a veritable nightmare. The only way to survive was by having an abundant English breakfast so you could get by on tea and crumpets for the rest of the day rather than dig into a kidney pie or some other English delicacy.
All that is inconsequential. The greatness of the English legacy lies in literature, in law, in its democratic, non-monarchic institutions, and The Beatles, not in its cuisine or its beer and ales.
Not for a moment did I intend to hold American beer as a paragon of what a good brew should be. I will readily agree that something like Coors or Millers ranks right up there with the worst of French beers as an unspeakable horror, and few things are as bad as French beer –with the possible exception of Kronenburg from Alsace. (Of course, in France why would anyone want to drink beer anyway?) Yes, I’d definitely agree with you that the typical American brew is wimpy, and it has way too much gas.
As for the institution of the monarchy, it’s hardly a British invention; there were kings in biblical and Greek mythologies. It’s the idea that people are entitled to any privilege by reason of birth that is repugnant. It doesn’t matter whether this happens in the UK, in Spain, the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, the Arabian Peninsula, Jordan or some other galaxy.
The argument that the monarchy "pays for itself" is disingenuous at best, ludicrous at worst. Where does the income of the Windsor House of Saxe Coburg derive from? From nothing other than wealth accumulated during centuries of exploitation of the British commoner. Very sporting of the queen to turn it over to the government money managers.
The suggestion that maintining a monarchy is more cost effective than maintaining an American president is also weak. You still have to elect a prime minister, and what’s worse, elections can happen at any time so their cost is unpredictable.
Unfortunately, being the USA’s "last remaining ally", as you put it, is not a particular honor given the current circumstances. I won’t presume to know whether a majority of the British electorate supports the action of the government.
In any event, my reply to Phosphor was not intended to single out the UK as if it were the only place on Earth where vestiges of a monarchy remain, but simply to ridicule the term "King" as applied to Jobs.
It’s not a bad idea either not to assume that the person you are addressing is as misinformed as you think that person is.
To get back on topic, let’s enjoy the views from the Hobble telescope and look at our tiny planet in perspective. Our utter insignificance in the Cosmos underscores the silliness of the notion of nobility and royalty.
I’m a big fan of the space science efforts. The Cassini-Huyghens probe is a magnificent achievement. The Cassini craft left conjunction yesterday on its trip to the Titan flyby on Oct 26, which will prepare for the Huyghens probe launch in December. I was a NASA contractor long ago, and I also worked for JPL at Goldstone.. Big science and fond memories. It could be dangerous, too. The head of the antenna group was found dead at the base of a big dish one morning. No hard hat was found. He evidently hit his head climbing through the dish and fell about sixty feet. I smacked my head in the same place on another antenna, but not hard enough to lose consciousness. My friend Dr Richard Goldstein, the radar astronomer who measured the astronomical unit to a precision that I believe still stands, told this story about how he came to be an experimenter at Goldstone. He was in the Army. They realized he was pretty bright so he was assigned to a controls lab for his tour of duty, instead of combat in Korea. When he got out, he worked in his father’s lamp store, which was not something he thought he would do for the rest of his life. He saved some money and went back to college on the GI Bill. In those days , PHDs were in demand so being bright, he ended up in a PHD program . He wanted to do real science and thought that the new field of radar astronomy would be interesting.(I’m coming to the punchline, wait for it.) His PHD advisor told him he was ok on his thesis and orals , but he needed one more required course, Ancient Greek. He said, "I’m a radar astronomer, what do I need Ancient Greek for?" His advisor replied," It’s pointless, difficult, and mandatory, and, therefore , it’s a perfect preparation for life."
<< remembering the food is not a pleasant thought. London restaurants in the 1960s >>
About 40 years out-of-date! Just one example: Michelin awards three stars extremely rarely but there are TWO three-star restaurants in ONE English village (Bray) — both run by Englishmen.
<< You still have to elect a prime minister, and what’s worse, elections can happen at any time so their cost is unpredictable. >>
That is the beauty of it: lose a Vote of Confidence in the House of Commons and the Prime Minister is obliged to call a General Election so the country is not necessarily landed with a particular administration for the full six years. (We may well see this happen in the near future!) And British Elections cost very little as candidates are each limited to a very small expenditure (by Law) and the campaign only extends over a few weeks.
Anyway, the British system suits the British people and foreigners have no business to criticize, or try to impose their ideas, on other countries’ cultures. Anywhere.
As an American citizen AND a British subject, I defend both systems as being right for their respective peoples. And I really resent criticism of a Monarch who has done a superb job for more than fifty years and, rightly, enjoys enormous affection from her subjects.
Your post is very revealing. You have no problem describing yourself as a British "subject", which to me sounds worse than being an object, and you resent criticism of the British monarch while recently you were reminding Todie of the freedom to criticize Bush.
Those are examples of why a monarchy is not an acceptable concept any more, anywhere on this planet.
I feel honoured and am proud to be a British subject while I feel perfectly free to criticize the elected leaders on both sides of the pond!
The point with a Constitutional Monarchy is that you have a head of state who remains above the political fray. The Sovereign serves ALL of the people — sadly, elected officials seldom seem to.
I don’t mean to pick a fight with you, but you are clearly the one who doesn’t get it.
By aiming down at the personal level you are exposing how this is an emotional issue for you, not a rational analysis.
It is not necessary to maintain a a monarchy rooted in nothing more than the accident of birth in order to separate the functions of the head of state and the head of the government. Other countries manage to achieve that through a democratic process, Germany and France, for example.
Perhaps it is you who lacks the necessary perspective through having experienced the same system ever since you were born and not reflecting on the experience and history of other nations. The UK is far from being the center of the world. Frankly, I feel relieved and flattered every time you use the term "foreigner" to refer to anyone who is not a British subject.
I am sorry that my response to an unnecessary and unprovoked attack on the traditions of another country in what is, after all, an international forum, should have disrupted your excellent thread.
I have played with the Hubble images and the Photoshop Action and you can generate some gorgeous results.
It was not my intention to offend you or anyone else. However, it is clear that you did find my post offensive, and for that I owe you an apology. Please accept my sincere apologies.
It was not my intention to offend you or anyone else.
Unbelievable!
How anyone could type this with a straight face is incomprehensible.
How did you presume anyone reading your scathing remarks about the UK, its cuisine, the monarchy and its legions of loyal subjects would react? Did you envision them dancing around the campfire in jubilant celebration with a pint in each hand?
Ive bitten my tongue on a number of occasions due to the harsh criticisms reflected in some of your posts, lately. But, this one is so far over the top that I just couldnt let it slide.
On the other hand, Ill give you credit for extending apologies to Ann… they most certainly were warranted. Now, what about the rest of the innocent bystanders who found your unprovoked and caustic comments unpalatable?
Welles: My sincerest apologies for further hijacking your thread. However, this is my one and only post on this matter. Good Luck, and all the best with your Hubble software… 😉
You are correct Welles this thread is exactly like the lounge.
Topic posted, topic drift, exchange of words, flame on, reconciliation, I’m sorry, some poster can’t resist to stoke the fires again and some knuckle-head who feels they need to decribe the whole thread. 😉
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