laurence
59d6e30712
The mechanical merge preserved both histories but left two repositories sitting side by side rather than one repository. This is the part that makes it whole. A top-level README explains the three strands - the telescope network and campaign, the processing code, and in-person observing plans - and says plainly that image data does not live here, because that is the first question anyone will have when they find a pipeline with no pixels. state/PROJECT.md was still describing a markdown-only reference project whose scope explicitly EXCLUDED automating bookings and image processing. Both of those are now most of what the project does, so the objective, scope and key facts are rewritten to match reality. state/DECISIONS.md records why the merge happened - the two repos were split by chronology rather than design, and the seam was already leaking, with the campaign's TODO citing results held in the other repo and the pipeline's README explaining a campaign it did not contain. It also records that the image data deliberately stays out of the repository. state/TODO.md gains the pipeline and observing work that previously had nowhere to live, including the measurement that changes the pipeline plan: per-frame processing is 2.9 seconds and the whole 24-frame session is 1.1 minutes single-threaded, so a scheduler earns nothing on stacking and should be pointed at the Monte Carlo stages instead. Internal links fixed for the new paths: pipeline/README.md referred to session-scripts/ throughout, and itelescope/README.md pointed at a state/ directory that is now one level up. The .gitignore conflict between the two repositories is resolved by combining them, with image formats ignored globally except under docs/, where documentation figures are committed deliberately.
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astrophotography
Everything to do with taking, processing and understanding astronomical images: the remote telescopes, the code that turns their frames into pictures and measurements, and the plans for observing in person.
Formed by merging the itelescope and astro-pipeline repositories, with the
history of both preserved.
Layout
| Directory | What it is |
|---|---|
| itelescope/ | The iTelescope.net remote telescope network: a review of every scope, a southern-target guide, the observing plans, and the points drain campaign |
| pipeline/ | The processing and analysis code. Calibration, stacking, plate solving, rendering and the science analyses |
| observing/ | Plans for observing in person. Currently the total solar eclipse of 12 August 2026 from Menorca |
| state/ | Project state under the Default Workflow: objective, current work, decisions, working notes |
| docs/ | The Default Workflow itself: branching, commits, documentation policy, cost control |
Start here
- Planning or reviewing a remote imaging run: itelescope/CAMPAIGN.md and itelescope/TELESCOPES.md
- Processing a session's data: pipeline/README.md
- What is happening right now: state/TODO.md
- Why something was done a particular way: state/DECISIONS.md
Where the image data lives
Not in this repository. A single calibrated frame is 61 MB and a session
runs to several gigabytes, so sessions stay on disk and the code finds them
through the ASTRO_SESSION environment variable:
set ASTRO_SESSION=...\NGC5128\20260721
python pipeline/stack.py
Each session directory carries its own METHODS.md describing what was done to
that data and what was found, written for a reader who was not there. The code
lives here; the pixels and the account of them live with the data.
Things learned the hard way
Recorded because each cost real time or real money, and because each is a requirement for anything built next rather than a curiosity:
- Measure whether a core is saturated before buying time to fix it. A foreground star 69 arcsec from Centaurus A's nucleus was mistaken for the galaxy, and a telescope booking was made to solve a problem that did not exist. Filter the stars out of the measurement first.
- Vet moving-object candidates in detector coordinates. Registration holds the sky still, so it drags sensor defects across the frame on perfectly straight, constant-rate tracks. Hot pixels are better-behaved asteroids than real asteroids. One cut took 141 confident spurious detections to zero.
- Never compare an aperture magnitude against a point-source catalogue without checking the source is a point. A resolved object looks exactly like a 2.8 magnitude outburst.
- Never fit a sky background to a field the target fills. A plane fitted around a large galaxy eats its halo, measured at -17.9 ADU/px. Fit the background and a source model together.
- A photographic ND filter is not a solar filter. It passes the infrared that carries the heat.