Images Information

There are three different types of images on telescope.org. Here is a little guide to understanding them.

Unprocessed Images

These are the images taken by the telescope. They are called unprocessed images because the telescope takes images using 16 bits of light intensity information rather than 8 bits (which is used for your computer screen, your digital camera, and just about everything else). This means that using the Flash viewer or Java viewer, you can change many settings about an image and bring out detail in different parts of the image. Find these jobs - all the telescope's work since 2003, under the "All Jobs" tab above, or find your own jobs using the "Your requests" menu option on the left.

Processed Images

After using the Flash or Java viewers and changing various parameters about an image to pull out detail, enhance, enrich, etc, an image can be saved to the gallery here - it is then called a processed image. Find the best rated processed images under the "Best" tab and the newest processed images under "Newest". You can search all the processed gallery images for images of particular objects, or images from a particular telescope camera under the "Search" tab.

Photo Galleries

The photo galleries house various galleries of images. Most are pictures taken on regular digital cameras on site in Tenerife. There is also a gallery of telescope images processed by users using their own processing software.