astrophotography/state
laurence 3f785136ed Bring the state files up to date so a cold session can resume
Rule 2 of the workflow is that state lives in the repo rather than the
chat, and a long session had put most of the current position only in
the chat. This writes it down.

TODO.md gains a RESUME HERE block at the top, because the useful
question for the next session is not what has been done but what to do
next and what is blocking it. It names the three live strands, the three
decisions waiting on the user, and the one thing that will break the
batch run if it is forgotten: NGC 6744 mixes bin1 luminance at 4096x4096
with bin2 colour at 2048x2048, so registration has to resample onto a
common grid. Nothing else in the archive does that, which is exactly why
it will be forgotten. It also drops three duplicate "Done (recent)"
headings that had accumulated, and tabulates what the five archived
sessions actually contain.

NOTES.md gains the gotchas, all of which produced plausible wrong
answers rather than errors: every frame is delivered twice as calibrated
and raw, so extracting both silently doubles the stack; an interrupted
segmented download leaves DIRECTORIES named like files, which defeats
anything that trusts an extension; a re-mirror duplicates rather than
replaces; two T20 archives are genuinely corrupt; extraction triples the
disk footprint and filled the drive. Alongside them the analysis lessons
from NGC 5128, kept for the same reason - each is a way to be confidently
wrong.

DECISIONS.md records why the pipeline reads headers rather than
filenames, and why imaging is being made push-button while the science
stays hand-driven.

ARCHITECTURE.md described a documentation-only repository with no code,
which stopped being true when the pipeline merged in. It now covers all
three parts, the code-and-data separation the pipeline is built around,
and the on-disk session layout.

Both of this session's own errors are recorded in TODO.md as things not
to repeat: measuring a foreground star instead of the galaxy nucleus and
booking telescope time to fix it, and telling the user NGC 6744 had not
been processed when it had.
2026-07-21 17:32:00 +01:00
..
ARCHITECTURE.md Bring the state files up to date so a cold session can resume 2026-07-21 17:32:00 +01:00
DECISIONS.md Bring the state files up to date so a cold session can resume 2026-07-21 17:32:00 +01:00
NOTES.md Bring the state files up to date so a cold session can resume 2026-07-21 17:32:00 +01:00
PR_TEMPLATE.md Telescope review: all 23 active iTelescope systems 2026-07-17 14:20:49 +01:00
PROJECT.md Make the merged repository coherent: README, state, and internal links 2026-07-21 17:16:20 +01:00
TODO.md Bring the state files up to date so a cold session can resume 2026-07-21 17:32:00 +01:00