.. C-Munipack - User's manual Copyright 2012 David Motl Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. $Id: introduction.rst,v 1.2 2012/10/07 08:54:32 dmotl Exp $ .. _introduction: Introduction ============ The software package C-Munipack presents the complete system for reduction of images carried out by a CCD or DSLR camera, oriented at the observation of variable stars. The specific programs of reduction process can be called from command line or via intuitive graphical user interface. The project is based on the previous Munipack package, the programs have the same name, but contrary to Munipack, it is coded in C/C++ language and it contains a several new functions and tools in addition. Assignment of the command-line parameters and the configuration files is similar in both projects, exceptions are described in the project documentation. The graphical user interface, which was build upon the portable GTK+ toolkit, should be familiar for Munidos users, but it takes full advantage of graphical environment, and therefore the interface is more comfortable and enables user an improved control over reduction process in comparison with original interface of Munidos. Features and capabilities ------------------------- The following list is a short overview of some of the features that the C-Munipack software provides: - Powerful graphical user interface that runs on most up-to-date operating systems. - Conversion of CCD frames from several input formats (see below) into the standard FITS format. - Calibration of CCD frames; correction of observation time, bias-frame correction, dark-frame correction, flat-flat correction and heliocentric correction. - Aperture photometry using fully configurable set of apertures of different sizes. - Automatic finding corresponding stars on a set of frames. - Easy-to-use making light curves for selected stars; either differential curves or instrumental (row) magnitudes for further processing. - Semiautomatic detection of new and unknown variable stars on a view field. - Computation of air mass coefficient. - Combining a set of bias, dark and flat frames into high quality master-bias, master-dark and master-flat correction frames. - Static or shared library with an extensive set of functions, that can be called using simple application building interface. - A complete set of user commands that can be used for automatic surveys. The following input formats are supported: - The FITS format with many date and time formats. - The SBIG's ST-x compressed and uncompressed formats. - The OES Astro format - Selected models of DSLR camera raw format: CRW, NEF [#]_ What can NOT the software do? ----------------------------- - It doesn't control a camera or a telescope of any manufacturer. - It doesn't compute the absolute standard magnitudes of measured objects. .. index:: single: authors Authors ------- The project manager David Motl is also the author of the most part of the source codes. Some small pieces of the sources originate from Munipack package, coded by Filip Hroch. Algorithms for aperture photometry originate from Daophot software by P. B. Stetson. Munifind algorithm originates from Varfind tool coded by Lukas Kral. The code of the lossless JPEG decoder incorporated in the DSLR image reader originates from Dave Coffin's dcraw utility. The package uses the following third party software: - FITSIO library, written by Dr. William Pence, NASA - EXPAT library, written by James Clark's - GTK+ toolkit, developed by the The GTK+ Team - IJG JPEG library by Independent JPEG Group - Sphinx documentation generator - MikTex implementation of Tex typesetting system .. index:: single: licence License and copying ------------------- This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the LICENSE file for more details. .. index:: pair: project; home page pair: version; latest Where can I get the latest version? ----------------------------------- The project is hosted by the SourceForge. The latest version of the binaries, source codes and documentation are available on the following address: http://c-munipack.sourceforge.net/ What's new in version 2.0 ------------------------- The main goals of this version is to allow one to define and work with multiple datasets (they are called projects). In previous versions, when you wanted to start a new task, you have to remove the frames that were registered in the application while deleting all temporary files (photometry files, etc.). Now, each task (project) has its own directory and the temporary files as well as the configuration is kept in it. One can easily switch between tasks easily or even work on multiple tasks at a time. .. rubric:: Footnotes .. [#] Please read :ref:`processing_raw_images` article before using the C-Munipack software to process snapshots from a DSLR camera.
