You fool you! Cats don't have OWNERS! Cats have STAFF!

What format are the drawings in and how do you want to combine them?

Sounds like a school assignment to me... Its been a few years (20+) since I had to do this, but I seem to remember the best way to acheive this was to use the standard Bresenham algorithm, but to just set more than one pixel at each point. Basically for a three pixel wide line, set the 8 pixels around each point as well as the point itself... Some optimisation is possible.

So they just use photoshop to paint portions of dust clouds red.

No they don't. I never have and no other astrophotographer I know ever has.

The selection of the portions is entirely arbitrary.

No. The colours are there in the real image. The image is just processed to enhance the colour already there... no more "arbitrary" than applying a sharpen or contrast stretch.

Companies sponsored by the British police force.

Wrong again.. The CCD was invented at AT&T labs in 1969, with the first commercial devices being produced by Fairchild semiconductor in 1974 the same year that a CCD was first used on a telescope. By 1979 Kitt Peak Observatory were using liquid nitrogen cooled chips as the primary detectors. Strangely I can't find any reference to the British police force in any history of the CCD chip...

Companies sponsored by the US military.

Wrong again my ill-informed friend. The techniques that led to the digital mobile phone systems of today werepioneered by radio astronomers at Cambridge and the VLA in New Mexico.

A German composer, using his own money.

Sir Frederick William Herschel, was a German-born British astronomer, technical expert, and composer. He became famous for his discovery of the planet Uranus, along with two of its major moons (Titania and Oberon), and also discovered two moons of Saturn. I'll give you that one... he was a composer as well as an astronomer. In the late 18th century most astronomers were amateurs, with only a few professionals paid for by public money.

How are close bodies even relevant to photoshopping dust clouds, anyway?
They're (damned near, at worst) visible to the naked eye, and clearly visible with mid-range binoculars, so no-one is dumb enough to photoshop them (the tabloid press notwithstanding).

So when I make a point that you can't argue, you claim it is not relevant... hmmm... BTW Pluto is magnitude 15... thats 9 magnitudes or 5,000x fainter than the human eye can see!

There are now direct images of planets orbiting several other stars

No, there are not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Exoplanets_detected_by_direct_imaging Come on... do your

As an amateur astronomer and lecturer of over 25 years experience, I must take exception to your unwarranted attack... I was a member of a team of amateur astronomers who imaged M42 with a specific aim to produce a correct colour image. We used LRGB imaging techniques with filters specially chosen to match the spectral behaviourof the human eye's cone cells, and photometric corrections to make sure the colour balance was correct. Stangely enough the end result was pretty close to the APOD image posted by the OP. "Hydrogen's red, the stars are blue. That's utter bollocks (and that much is true)." Hydrogen is a clear gas, that emits, when ionised, a spectrum predominantly in the red and near IR. I have done this myself as a physics undergrad. Stars emit black body radiation with a peak dependent on the surface temperature. Hot O and A type stars are blue-white, cooler stars are yellow, orange or red. Interstellar dust on the other hand, tends to scatter blue light more than red light, meaning it tends to look bluish. This is the same effect that gives us a blue sky and red sunsets. As for stealing budget from "real" science... Astronomy may not produce tangible results in the short term, but it has been a driving force behind other scientific and engineering disciplines for the last several centuries... Who do you think pioneered the CCD technology now used in digital cameras or the signal processing technology that made mobile phones possible? Both of these,and others, can be linked directly to astronomical research. As for you're claim that astronomers have not confirmed and planets or black holes... Who discovered Uranus, Neptune and Pluto? There are now direct images of planets orbiting several other stars, and very strong evidence for over 300 more. Please get your facts straight before launching into an attack on a group of hard working professionals and amateurs who produce so much with a budget that is a tiny fraction of what other disciplines (such as particle physics) get.

I can't compete with 40 years (I'm only 42!), but back when I was in high school I built a 6502 based system with 16KB of memory and 4KB of EPROM that talked to my BBC B via RS232... Does this count as a co-processor or a discrete component micro-controller?

I must take issue with your use of the word "fake". The colours shown in that image are accurate. The red is caused by ionised hydrogen emitting, the blue is light from stars embedded in the nebula being scattered by dust. The only enhancement in this image is that the long exposure has captured more light than our pitiful human eyes can manage.

You can't have a go at the French when they aren't here to defend themselves... And we all know how good they are at defending themselves... 1914, 1940...

I actually started writing software several years before Win95. To be honest it is more like 23 years than 25, but I was rounding up!

I have been looking. I have had several interviews but they all seem to much the same. Does no-one actually write applications any more. Has software development degenerated into a game of high-tech Lego?

I've been a software engineer for nigh on 25 years and just recently I have come to realise that I just don't give a damn about software anymore. Maybe its because I work for a company that just treats us all like resources not people. Maybe its because all I get to do is customise someone else's badly written software. Or maybe its just that software development has changed so much since I started out that it has left me behind. When I started, I was writing windows controls for Win95, C++ was new and exciting and no-one had heard of a garbage collector. Now all I ever seem to write is glue code sticking other developer's components together. Am I alone in this, or have other people hit this kind of crisis?

Rarius

ARGH!!!!!!! At the risk of starting another strongly-typed/weakly-typed language debate, the very concept of "var" should be excised from human history. "var" is uncontrolled polymorphism at its worst (polymorphism is great, but it must be used carefully). It's lazy and dangerous and I hate the fact that I have to use it when I use Linq.

This table isn't even mentioned in the database documentation. All the settings should be accessed through a .Net wrapper library, which helpfully renames some of the fields for no apparent reason.

I just looked in the standatd demo database for Sage 200 accounts... There are four tables with over 100 columns and one with 427! This table is called setup and stores one record containing a load of the system settings for the application. God I love (not) Sage!

Because FAMAS am bestest gun!

The fact that you have had bad experiences with code that was over OOed and layered doesn't mean that OO and layering are bad ideas in and of themselves. If you think object orientation is a "complication" to simple procedural and event driven code, you obviously don't understand the basic principles of OO. The troubles you are having in your current project are indicative of bad project management, not bad programming technology. There is good OOD and bad OOD... thats not OO's fault! Object Orientation is probably the single biggest simplifier in software development of the last 25 years. I am currently working on a project of over 200,000 lines of code split into three layers and over 250 classes, but I can explain how it works to a collegue in under 5 minutes flat. I challenge anyone to handle that level of complexity without OO!