gcx photometry and camera control

File Release Notes and Changelog

Release Name: 0.8.2

Notes:

---

Changes: 0.8.2 Include outliers in me1 calculation (resulting in larger me1 figures for frames that have either many or low error outliers). Plot radial profiles and encircled flux for stars. Report fitted FWHM. Improved synthetic mean histogram clipping behaviour with degenerate histograms. Corrected a small error in calculating sky contribution. Moved the zoom/cut status to the top-right and expanded the status bar. Quick star measure from the star pop-up menu. Plot to file is now a global option. Changed the status bar so that all messages stay until being replaced by new ones. 0.8.1 Create synthetic stars with Gaussian or Moffat profiles. Show more info in the star edit dialog. Make sure the errors are positive in the henden import. Fixed an error in magnitude calculation (of the order of 0.005). 0.7.8 Changed "recipy" to "recipe" in many places. Fixed a segfault when loading a fits header with an "object" field that consists of blanks. 0.7.7 Clamp the extracted star width in centroiding error calculations to avoid underestimated errors for faint stars. Fixed an error in position error SNR scaling. 0.7.6 Plot of position errors after star centering. If we have enough position reference stars with defined errors, other stars are ignored in the wcs fit. 0.7.5 Fixed strndup and getline and some headers so it compiles cleanly on bsd (tested on freebsd 3.5). 0.7.4 Reductions with '-u' run in batch mode. Accept decimal and optional eastern longitudes. Fast .gcx file search. use fractional pixels in central aperture. a second step of aperture centering refinement uses pixels inside the measuring aperture that are above sky. report star frame positions and centroid errors in phot rep. 0.7.3 support for DATE_OBS and TIME_OBS fields header fields debug prints scintillation pars check support for IC and sao edb catalogs 0.7.2 Fixed initialisation of FN_EPOCH, which caused a segfault when loading fits frames that didn't have a EQUINOX keyword. Added an option to handle (broken) unsigned fits files. 0.7.1 Synthetic mode sky estimation; Renamed some pars and changed comments; Option to list all options' doc in latex format; _many_ chapters added to the manual; Tycho stars are now field, not cat; When loading field stars, they are merged in, rather than just added; aavso format reporting uses the validation file to find out the designation; aperture photometry uses the multiframe routines for zeropoint fitting; we try to get an initial wcs from various fits fields (ra, dec, objctra, objctdec, secpix, obejct); reading/writing recipy/star files is now done using the stf; add a parameter to limit the standard stars used for reduction to a circular region around the frame center; file output options for aperture photometry; aavso format output for aperture photometry; multiframe has more output options; plot a star's time series; create recipy moved to the file menu; wcs info updated on fits save as after a fit; 0.6.1 Added a new multi-frame reduction module doing transformation coefficient fitting and all-sky reduction; Various plots from the multi-frame data; Changed the order in which the option trees appear in the option dialog; 0.5.10 Added an option to discard standard stars that cannot be located; Positional tolerance for merging is now a parameter; Fixed the filter wheel filter list parsing; 0.5.9 Fixed the initialisation of stacking options from params; Fixed updating the alignment stars when changing align ref frames; Fixed last_open logic for "add to star list"; also set all unset last_open paths when the first file is open. Changed the "convert" option name to "import"; The reduction band is now taken from the frame header (with an option to force it); Recipy merge function added; Create recipy from tycho function added; 0.5.8 Labels drawn on selected stars; Added a zoom limit parameter for star symbol display; Fixed MJD to JD in report conversion; Added filter wheel support; 0.5.7 New stars/add from catalog command can be used to set the initial wcs; Added an option to create a blank frame; Moved processing/photometry submenu items into processing; Added stars/remove off-frame command; The star edit dialog now shows coords with 1/10 arcsec precision; Read/merge/save .gcx catalogs; gcvs and gcvs-pos converters; 0.5.6 Fixed a bug in boolean options parsing; Added star menu commands to change the display limiting magnitude and star sizes; Added an option to avoid displaying stars fainter than the display limiting magnitude; Made some cleanups in star selection; Added shortcut for loading tycho stars; Made gsc2 import to only generate field stars; Added an option to control is the star symbols are zoomed with the display; New algorithm for star sizes; Added a menu option for star editing (so a right-click is no longer required); Display local image stats on middle and right clicks (so that we can get those stats even near stars); Fixed a bug in wcs fitting (that prevented convergence for fields that have ~90 degrees rotation). Fixed Tycho loading for large fields. 0.5.5 Convert recipy files containing some comment tags to the aavso db format (useful for digitising charts). Create a blank frame for loading catalog objects onto something. 0.5.4 Changed the default to run ccd reduction on files specified on the command line. Added the -N/--no-reduce option to skip reduction steps when loading. New options editing dialog that allows more information to be displayed on each option. Star colors are now of choices type (easier to select). Changed star detection to detect saturated stars. Moved the photometry menu under processing. Slew end ra error limits are scaled by 1/cos(delta). When selected, a cat_star with no smags will display the generic mag in the statusbar. 0.5.3 Added ccd reduction functions (command-line and gui). Add option to use centering moves for small scope slews. Status pop-up window (visible from a distance) when obscript stops. Added a telescope pointing dithering option. 0.5.2 Added the missing call to get an image in obscript ckpoint. Corrected the bad test for existance of frame in obscript save command 0.5.1 Added the --debug option to tune program verbosity. Fixed a wcs fitting problem that prevented frames with high rotation angles to converge. Added Losmandy mount support, which is now the default. To revert to the old "lx200 classic" mode, comment out the LOSMANDY define in tele.c; the new mode "should" work also with meade lx200, but it wasn't tested. Added options in the obslist dialog to filter objects that are east or west of the meridian. Report an error when an object couldn't be found by the "goto" obscript command. Fixed a problem when fitting the WCS of a flipped field. Made a change to the pair-finding code; The situation when many field stars don't appear in the catalog is now handled better; Increasing .wcs.max_skip will help in this case - but also increase running time. Introduced a "flipped field" parameter that will make the initial wcs "flipped". A field where N is up and W is right has normal orientation. If N is down and W is right, we have a "flipped" field (CDELT1 and CDELT2 have opposing signs). Fixed a bug causing an obscure crash in obslist (introduced with the change in end return value from next_token in 0.4.5). Changes in camera and telescope control dialog: we have slew limits (N, E, S, W) to be able to prevent german mounts from meridian-flipping on obscript gotos. Buttons in telescope control to generate sync/additional align commands. Added "abort" buttons that stop an ongoing telescope slew. Added the display of hour angle and airmass in the obs page of the camera/telescope control dialog. 0.4.6 Fixed the camera comm bug introduced in 0.4.5. 0.4.5 Went over the parameter names and changed a few for brevity. Hopefully for the last time, as this means that some old rc files cannot be read anymore. Removed all warnings from gsc. Added the option to include catalog objects in generated recipies and convert them to standards. Fixed some points in ccd_frame.c and photometry.c where older versions of gcc would give an error. Changed the example data. 0.4.4 Load Tycho2 stars; Handle magnitudes without qualifiers; Fix the situation when we don't have the standard mags we want to reduce against (by no longer reporting stars); Command-line option to modify parameters for a given run; Report converter to tabular format; DMS format now handles any separator between d, m and s (including space); Fixed a few memory leaks Will calculate airmass from time and observer location. Changed the save format for .gcxrc in a compatible way (all the entries how have their full path). Removed a segfault that appeared when reading a malformed .gcxrc file. 0.4.3 New dialog to edit/check the wcs; New dialog to create recipy files interactively; Read/write new style recipy files; Rationalised star types; Recipy conversion batch command; Moved "load recipy" to file menu; Loads gsc2 field stars (will load the stars from a file downloaded from http://www-gsss.stsci.edu/support/data_access.htm) 0.4.2 gcx now stays in a proper source tree, with ./configure and all that. Also has some bug fixes. New features: * can run photometry recipy files; * new observation script commands; * can run an obscript directly from the command line (no need to click); * path searching for obs and rcp files; * a little bit of online help; * work on the manual has started. 0.2.1 This is a major rewrite of the interface to cx, now using gtk+. Also, the camera control code has been moved to a separate process (cpxctrl). new features include: * can read gsc field stars and search edb files for objects; * can match gsc start positions to sources in ccd frames to obtain true world coordinates * controls lx200 telescopes; * can run observations scripts. CX_EDB_DIR to point to the gsc directory (gsc must be a subdirectory of the one pointed to by CX_EDB_DIR). Edb format files for various other objects will be searched from this directory too (see ccd/edb.c for more details). Command-line image processing options still call old-style x11 functions from x11ops. These are just leftovers from the last version, and will be replaced - most likely they don't work; in the meantime, use cx 0.1.0 for image calibration/stacking. ===================== Readme for v0.1.0 (cx) This is the cx program, that controls cpx3m cameras. To build, run make in the toplevel directory, then make install, which copies the binary to /usr/local/bin, and makes it setuid root. cx can be used in two modes: in interactive mode (invoked by cx -i) it can control a cpx3m camera and acquire images. Type help at the prompt for the available commands. Images are brought up for display into windows. One can adjust the way the images are displayed by issuing key commands while the focus is on the image window. A summary of the available key commads can be obtained by pressing F1. In batch mode, cx can do ccd reductions (dark/flat), bad pixel corrections, image stacking, combining and alignment, and run photometry on series of images. Batch commands can be shown by running cx without arguments. The program consists of the following parts: ============================================ libccd (in the ccd directory) contains code for handling image frames, reading/writing fits files, searching image frames for stars and doing aperture photometry. libnut contains code for matching star positions on the frames with catalogs, to aid in identifying objects. libgsc is a slightly modified version of the code supplied with the gsc catalog, used to browse GSC for catalog stars. The main program (sources in the toplevel directory) does the actual camera control and image display. The Future of cx. ================= Cx is being rewritten and will be called gcx in future releases. gcx has many improvements, the most important being: * uses gtk for a more consistent user interface. * the camera control code is being moved to a separate program, which connects to gcx via tcp-ip. This way, gcx doesn;t need to run setuid root, and we can support more cameras. * gcx supports field identification at the telescope, and can help with pointing problems.