Technical data
Chapter 9 Options 43
9. Options
The Options menu contains a variety of commands that are useful in setting up or optimizing your display for the
current task at hand.
Night Vision
The Night Vision command changes all of the standard system colors to shades of red to help maintain your eyes
adaptation to the dark. This is useful if you are using the program during actual observing session in the observatory or
in the field. After selecting this option you should also lower the brightness on your monitor.
The status of the night vision option is saved from session to session, remember to turn it off when you are using the
program in normal lighting.
Grayscale Palette
and Standard Palette
The Grayscale Palette and Standard Palette commands are used together to optimize your systems' ability to display
gray scale images. If you are running in a standard VGA display mode, these commands will be enabled. Since these
commands are not required in other display modes, they will appear disabled.
The standard VGA mode allows only 16 simultaneous colors, with this limitation in mind, Windows requires that these
colors be set to the standards 'pure' colors, e.g. red, green, blue, magenta, etc., this provides only two gray values plus
black and white. To improve you capability of viewing the high resolution B/W images, Autostar Suite re-programs
the hardware registers on the VGA board to display 16 gray values instead of 16 'pure' colors. By selecting the
standard 16 color palette in the Image, Palette menu when the Grayscale Palette is active, you will be able to view the
images in 16 shades of gray
NOTE: The Grayscale Palette function removes all colors from the display leaving only shades of gray. Make sure you
restore the regular colors by selecting the Standard Palette before you run other color intensive applications.