AstroImage 2002 - Welcome

Welcome to the AstroImage 2002 Conference Proceedings CDROM.

We are very pleased in your interest in AstroImage 2002. In October of last year, a group of us in the OCA Astroimage special interest group started talking about expanding Astroimage with the intent of developing it into a national caliber annual event. Through a lot of the hard work by that team since then we have put together a conference and this accompanying CDROM that we hope you will find both informative and enjoyable.

On this CDROM, you will find presentation materials from a wonderful cross section of experts covering a variety of film and CCD subjects. We were also privileged to have Mr. Jack Newton here to not only cover a specific topic but also to present a keynote address on his views on the past, present and future of astroimaging. His keynote presentation is on this CDROM in video form so that you may enjoy it just as the attendees did live. This video is a byproduct of the committee's effort to also stream the conference to remote sites so that a wider audience might participate in the conference. By all accounts, this too was a success.

The other Saturday technical presentations are provided on this disk in the form of slides provided by the speakers along with supplementary material in some cases. As a bonus, we also have material from the Friday evening Beginners' Sessions. We thank all of the speakers for excellent presentations and their enthusiastic participation in this first "new" AstroImage Conference.

We also thank all of the sponsors who contributed to the promotion of astroimaging. Without their support of this conference, it would not have been possible to even attempt such a large undertaking.

And last, but not least, we gratefully acknowledge the enormous help all of the OCA volunteers gave us in actually running the conference. It would not have run half as smoothly as it did without the contributions of the many individuals who loaned us equipment, gave up their weekend, and in some cases, their opportunity to see the conference.

For the future, we look forward to even better conferences, so we welcome your suggestions and your participation in the coming years.