Come join the friendliest, most engaging and inclusive astronomy forum geared for beginners and advanced telescope users, astrophotography devotees, plus check out our "Astro" goods vendors.
Come join the friendliest, most engaging and inclusive astronomy forum geared for beginners and advanced telescope users, astrophotography devotees, plus check out our "Astro" goods vendors.
I’m doing more and more astro imaging. Currently I use a laptop with an external hard drive that is about 2TB. All the imaging data is stored there for each night. I then later bring that back and transfer the files to a much larger desktop RAID system.
While that works fine in process, the amount of storage is getting very large. Last night was fairly clear the entire time. My focus was Jupiter and Saturn early in the evening, and the Moon later when it rose. I was out about 6 hours in total and ended up with about 350GB of image data. Virtually all of that is raw video captures. That is before any image processing like PIPP, Registax, GIMP, etc.
Last night I captured about 25 video streams ranging in size from 2GB to about 14GB. I expect that I will end up with maybe 4-5 best streams that end up as stacked images. In the past I have saved everything, but that’s beginning to get large in total size.
I am curious as to what approaches others use in both how your imaging data is stored and how much you save. What do you keep and what do you discard? How do you choose?
I operate from a 2TB (I think) external drive for imaging captures. However, once I've processed what I want, I delete everything. Of course, since most of my captures are solar and solar changes literally every minute, so keeping old capture data is useless.
Having said that, I just stumbled across an image capture that had been "laying around" in my drive since 2016.
Clear Skies & Stay Safe
John (Urban Astronomer) Apertura AD10 Dob; XLT 150 Dob; XLT 120EQ; Lunt Solar 60 PT/B1200; ES AR102; SW Pro 100ED; 2 SW Pro 80ED's; 90mm Eq; WO Z-61; SW 90mm Virtuso Mak; 2 Orion ST-80's; Quark-C; Cams: Polemaster, ASI120MM-S, ASI174MM & ASI174MM-C
I started out saving my raw images on DVD - but after 30 DVDs I decided that wasn't very useful. Rotation of the images - either the camera or differing times usually means only the central area of the images are useful. So I started saving just the final stacked image - maybe to use with another stacked image later on - and the final post processed image on DVD. Even at that I fill a DVD with about 20 images.
"To be good is not enough when you dream of being great"
I have a very difficult time of letting things go, especially images and video streams from a night's work. What I've learned about myself is that I thoroughly enjoy capturing those images and video streams and not so much the processing. What I now do is after I have processed the object say Jupiter or Saturn, I then get rid of all the video streams from that date, if I need more I'll go back and capture more.
This is a great discussion topic. Typically, I will throw away all of the processed information except for maybe the results of a few key steps. I don't get rid of the original data unless there is an obvious problem with the images (out of focus, poor tracking etc.).
My thought is if I learn something new with processing, I will have data to work with. I have gone back and reprocessed data a couple of different times after picking up new workflows. The raw data by itself is not too bad to store, but if you tack on the calibrated, the corrected, and the aligned images you are 4x the data.
What I struggle with is the PixInsight project files. I store those for now, but they are on my processing computer, not the hard drive for the images. That takes a little pressure off of the images hard disk, but at some point I will have to decide about those as well.