Dereferencing a Pointer Array

[Art Burden <aburden(at)mpl.ucsd.edu>]

Hi,

I have a structure that contains a pointer array that points to twelve
512-by-512 images.  I would like to find the mean image from the twelve
images in a simple and fast way.  I understand that I can dereference
the pointer to an image or an individual element in an image by using,
for example

img = (*info.images[0])
and
img_element = (*info.images[0])[240,240]

but I can't figure out a way to dereference the pointers to all 12 pixel
values from a given coordinate in one step.  At this stage, I pass the
structure into my averaging subroutine and  I create a new array to
store the 12 images. I then fill the array by dereferencing the pointer
to each image in a loop.  Finally, I  loop through the rows and columns
to get each mean pixel value, as shown below.  Can anyone think of a
better (mainly faster) way to do this?

;retrieve array of images
ffim = lonarr(12,512,512)
for num=0,11 do ffim[num,*,*] = *info.images[num]

;calculate mean of images
mean_ff = fltarr(512,512)
for ir = 0,511 do for ic = 0,511 do mean_im[ic,ir] = mean(ffim[*,ic,ir])

I greatly appreciate your help with this,

Art
aburden@mpl.ucsd.edu