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"The Digital Universe v1.5 Logo"
The logo for the Digital Universe was created entirely on the Amiga and has a few years of history behind it.
Long ago before the internet became common place it was difficult to get hold of Digital Universe in the UK so I contacted the author Dan Charrois about
bulk ordering copies for Amiga using astronomers in the UK. This was of course a long time before I became involved in porting the OS4 version, and I
was not involved with DU in any way at the time.
One thing the CD lacked was some sort of cover so with Dan's permission I created one using Digita's "Wordworth" to print out and
send along with the CDs as a little extra.
The deep sky images were taken by myself while on holiday in Portugal at the COAA in 1995 using
a Starlight Express CCD camera connected to the COAA's 20" reflecting telescope. Of
course there was no Amiga software for such cameras but the maker of the SX cameras was also on holiday at the same time and sent me some BASIC code
so I could process the raw images myself at home using my Amiga 1200. I wrote using HiSoft BASIC a programme, AmiPix which I used to generate and
process the Starlight Express images taken at the COAA. Not having an SX camera I never got around to finishing nor distributing this image processing software.
Sadly anything written with HiSoft Basic will not work on Amiga OS4 but one day I may re-write and finish the AmiPix software using C if
there is any interest in such a thing.
The images are as follows, Messier 20 "The Trifid Nebula", Messier 17 "The Swan Nebula" and NGC 7006 a compact globular cluster in the constellation of Delphinus.
The original CD cover was used as a basis for the current logo which was printed from Wordworth as a postcript file and then
converted to a PDF and "printed" as an image file. A larger version of the logo can be viewed here.
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