I can’t see you – it’s too loud in here.

Once upon a time I started to write a post about some night astrophotography I made and before I could post it, the whole thing blew up into an excruciatingly long and technical exposé. This is thus the first post in a series on what I call computational photography, one of my favorite activities with my camera.

I can’t help it – I’m an engineer (yes, you’re born that way, and yes, this Dilbert cartoon is exactly how it goes down in the ER).

What this means is that when I take a picture with my camera, I see numbers. Today’s discussion is about the difference between wanted and unwanted numbers. In this case, we will call the wanted numbers a signal, and the unwanted numbers noise. These are terms from the world of signal processing, which is oh so exciting!

Okay, what is noise and why…