The Education and Public Outreach Department at ESO’s Headquarters in Garching near Munich, Germany, is offering an opportunity to work with
Astronomical image retouching
You will be working with astronomical data from some of the world’ s most advanced telescopes, such as ESO’s Very Large Telescope and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, as part of the production of stunning and beautiful images of the Universe.
Astronomical data go through various steps before resulting in a publication-ready image such as those appearing in magazines. One of the steps is performed in Photoshop. It consists in removing all the defects, artifacts and blemishes that are present in the raw data and do not come from the astronomical objects.
Requirements
Some knowledge of image cleaning
Work with Photoshop (not Elements nor GIMP, for compatibility issues)
Patience
Some knowledge of, or interest in, astronomy may be useful but is not necessary
Job description
We estimate that this job will take 20 to 25 hours depending on experience.
Your task is to remove defects from all the layers in a PSD file. The defects to be cleaned out are described in this document; clean out all those matching the defects in Section 2.1 (and only these):
a.- Bad columns and traps
b.- Stuff on the detector
c.- Cosmic rays
d.- Saturation bleeds
e.- Over saturation dot
f.- Satellite streaks
Do not clean other issues you find that are not in this list (the other sections in the document are for background information only).
A small example PSD file (470Mb!) is available in example.psd. The actual file will be provided by the responsible person at ESO and may have a size of between 1 and 2 GB.
Feedback
You are requested to submit a partially completed file for evaluation (PSD or full-res jpg, save-for-web, quality 80) after about every 5 hours of work and will receive feedback on the progress.
Delivery
The partially cleaned files, as well as the final PSD, must be transferred via anonymous ftp to ftp.eso.org, in directory incoming/general/outreach (ftp://ftp.eso.org/incoming/general/outreach/ but note that the directory cannot be read from outside of ESO). The files must be named xxxx_NN_date.psd where xxxx is the original name, NN are your initials, and date is the date of the file, for instance eagle_OH_2009-05-21.psd.
When transferring a file to the ftp server, send us a note announcing it.
Remarks
We have many other images in the pipeline.