Raw data backup

It may not be one of the most entertaining stages of astrophotography but, not for this reason, we cannot fail to mention its importance in the workflow.

The data acquisition process basically produces files in FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) format, which can weigh a few mega bytes. For example, if we think of a typical night of observation, in which we have acquired about 8 hours of data spread over light frames of 300 seconds duration, we could easily end up with more than 2 GB of data. To this we must add the calibration frames, so we must consider a good backup media for those raw files.

Usually the day after the acquisition, we transfer the raw data files from our acquisition device (AsiAir Plus) to our reduction computer. And from there, we immediately create another backup to an external solid state drive (SSD). So in case of any stupid file management operation or hardware fail, we’ve got a backup of our precious raw data.

Reduction backup

During the pre-process and post-process, a huge amount of files is produced as result of the several stages of the data reduction. Most of them can be safely purged afterwards since they use lot of disk space and are not really needed. At the end of the process, we keep the master files in our backup system.
And once we’re ready with the post-process, the final reduced image is then uploaded to AstroBin.