Calibrating Flat Fields in MaxIm DL

This video is a walk-through of the Bridgewater State University Observatory's flat field calibration procedure using MaxIm DL 6. This procedure was developed over years of using MaxIm DL while observing when the best results were obtained when calibrating images from our Apogee Alta U47 camera. It is possible that this procedure may not be ideal for a setup other than our own. We are in a heavily light-polluted location and our camera had visually obvious defects when observing in the short-wavelength portion of the visible spectrum and UV. We no longer allow MaxIm DL to make any automatic choices regarding what calibration images to use for which files, so we calibrate flats manually and separately from our data/astrophotography images. This means our process is more lengthy than it would be if directly following the basic procedure outlined in MaxIm's help files, but it's robust. It is still possible to achieve poor results if the flat calibration images are for some reason not representative of the deviations from average brightness in the data images (for example, if the camera's shutter pattern appears noticeably in the flats or if the focus is significantly different). This video is about 55 minutes long because it contains detailed explanations for decisions made during the calibration process.