.. 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: preface.rst,v 1.2 2012/09/01 12:47:00 dmotl Exp $ Preface ======= At the beginning of the 21st century, astronomical photometry has changed a lot. Instead of visual and photoelectric observation, the observers began to use CCD cameras. The CCD cameras became cheaper and therefore more affordable even for amateur astronomers. This gave rise to the demand for software tool for processing the CCD-data, which would be available for the amateur astronomer, user-friendly, but also using reliable algorithms. In April 2003 the C-Munipack Project was started; its goal was to supply astronomers with powerful but also user-friendly tool for processing their CCD-data. At the time, two similar tools existed: MuniDOS, a text-mode program, which is somewhat limited by the user interface. Additionally, according to the authors, the program is not using modern algorithms, and no future development is planned. The other available was Munipack, written partly in Fortran and partly in C. Munipack is modern and still maintained, but there were several disadvantages: the users of the Windows operating system would have severe problems with its compilation, and the graphical interface, that program offers, is available only for unix-based operating systems. Of course, there are some commercial products available on the market, some of them are really good, but these products are not affordable for amateur astronomers, since they have to pay for everything by themselves. About this document ------------------- This manual is an official user manual and reference of the C-Munipack software. The document consists of several parts. The first, introductory, part gives a reader a basic information about the software, its authors, features and internet resources that are related to the project. The second part describes in details the graphical user interface, Muniwin, which is the interface that most users uses for their work all the time. The fourth part contains detailed description of a set of user commands that are called the C-Munipack toolkit, these commands can be used to build automated shell scripts. If you are a novice user, please read the chapter Getting started first. This chapter is a simple tutorial that guides your through the basic CCD frame processing work-flow using the set of sample frames that are available on project's home page. The basic concepts of the software are also explained there. Acknowledgement --------------- I would like to thank to all my colleagues, who contributed with their ideas, advice, and suggestions, to this program. Namely to Filip Hroch for sharing the Munipack source code, and for his help with porting it from Fortran to C, to Lukas Kral for sharing his Varfind source code, to Miloslav Zejda, Ondrej Pejcha, Petr Svoboda, Volkan Bakis for their help with testing and valuable suggestions to the user interface and also to Jitka Kudrnacova and Petr Lutcha for their help with the user manual. Other resources --------------- The detailed description of algorithms incorporated in the C-Munipack software as well as the specification of the file formats used are available in a separate document called 'Theory of operation'. It is included in both the source and binary installation packages and can be accessed from the Muniwin program (menu Help).
