Just thought that this might be worth mentioning, as it pertains to both astrophotography and photography in general.
I've been messing with digital imaging for a long time and I've found some software which is not well known but is... well... pretty amazing for certain imaging needs.
The first I'd like to recommend is BenVista Photozoom:http://www.benvista.com/main/content/content.php
Basically it enlarges digital images... and does so better than any program I have ever seen before. And way better than Adobe Photoshop's built in Bicubic resize.
If you have a small CCD image of a distant object, you obviously would probably like it to be a bit bigger to make it easier to view. Zooming a digital image cannot actually add detail, but it can make it much easier to view and see certain details of. Of all the a image enlargement algorithms I've seen, BenVista's S-Spline interpolation seems to stand above the rest in resizing while minimizing distortion, rough edges and pixelation. The software also includes other interpolation methods which may work better for certain situations.
Noise Ninja: (Photoshop plugin): http://www.picturecode.com/download.htm
Best simple method I have yet seen for reducing photo noise while maintaining detail. Works especially well with images which are too dark for the film or CCD and therefore result in uniform grainy noise. Used in combination with Photoshop's Shadow-Highlight adjustment and level adjustment can make images better than one might think possible, given the original.
Focus Magic: http://www.focusmagic.com/
available in a stand-alone of photoshop plugin. It's truely amazing some of the details which can be recovered with this algorithm from out of focus or motion blurred images.
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