Introduction to Lynkeos

What is it ?

Lynkeos is a Cocoa application dedicated to the processing of planet images taken with a webcam through a telescope.

Where does that weird name comes from ?

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

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 QuickTime® sequences or still images, in any image format supported by Cocoa, as input
It generates a 16 bits RGB TIFF image as output, to be further processed with some all-purpose image processing application.

The steps to process a collection of images are :

If you are new to Lynkeos, you should go on with the Tutorial.