RC Astro was founded in Austin, Texas, by Russell Croman to create innovative solutions for astronomical image processing, enabling astrophotographers everywhere to transform their hard-won raw image data into beautiful depictions of our universe. For two decades, RC Astro tools have brought unsurpassed technical performance to some of the hardest image processing problems: deconvolution, noise reduction, star separation, and gradient elimination. Widely known for their effectiveness and ease of use, RC Astro tools are used by thousands of amateur astrophotographers around the world as well as by professional institutions such as the Space Telescope Science Institute, home of operations and image processing for the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes.

Russell is an independent engineer and software developer. He currently works full time on image processing solutions for astrophotography from his home near Austin, Texas. He was previously Vice President of R&D Engineering at Silicon Laboratories, and is the inventor or co-inventor of 29 patents. He earned a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Washington State university in 1993. Though trained as an engineer, he is an artist at heart, and enjoys combining art and science to create beautiful astrophotography of his own and the tools to help others do the same.

Russell’s own astrophotography accomplishments are noteworthy. He has been photographing the deep sky since 2002, producing award-winning work that has appeared in online and print publications such as NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day (16 photos) and National Geographic. He won the Advanced Imaging Conference’s Hubble Award in 2010 for significant and sustained contributions to the astrophotography community.