I have written some scripts which collect photos, then average them together, and subtract out an averaged background (as Rana described in elog 7678). 

I am not seeing any beam spots on any of the resulting pictures. 

The script to get 500 pictures is

.../scripts/general/videoscripts/videocapture50

and it's inputs are {name of camera} {folder to save in} {noBeam or withBeam}, where noBeam and withBeam indicate whether or not the PSL shutter is closed.  For the saved photos to work nicely with the Matlab script, the folder to save in should be in the format (Month_day_year/CAMERA).  So today's ITMYF pics, for example, are in Nov_7_2012/ITMYF/ .

So, you run it once with the shutter open, and once again with the shutter closed.

To create the new picture, open ImageBkgndSubtractor.m in the same .../scripts/general/videoscripts folder, edit the top few lines (month, day, year, camera name).  Run it, and it will read through all the pictures and supply a background-subtracted output, and save the output (as well as a version where every pixel value is multiplied by 3) in the same folder as the 500 pictures.

The pictures are all saved in

/opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/scripts/general/videoscripts/photos

so really, for my example above, it would be /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/scripts/general/videoscripts/photos/Nov_7_2012/ITMYF/, with 2 subfolders, noBeam and withBeam, and the final pictures are saved in /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/scripts/general/videoscripts/photos/Nov_7_2012/ITMYF/ .

In other, semi-unrelated news, the ITMXF camera has been not working for a while.  The bottom right quad on the test mass tv has been dark for at least a week or two.  Steve, when you have a chance (after the oplevs are all taken care of), can you see if there's something obvious that's wrong?

Here are the background subtracted photos that I've taken today:

MC2F is included, even though you can see the spot usually, just to prove that I'm not trying to subtract away the spot!  You just can't see it in any other picture.