laurence
3f785136ed
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.
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Decisions
A dated, append only log of decisions and their rationale. Newest at the top. Never rewrite past entries; if a decision is reversed, add a new entry that says so.
2026-07-21: the pipeline reads headers, not filenames
The first pipeline parsed calibrated-T32-...-Luminance-BIN2-W-300-001.fit to
learn a frame's filter, binning and exposure. That works for one telescope, one
binning and one exposure length. Three of the four archived sessions have no
luminance channel at all and one is from 2021 with different naming, so the
approach could not survive contact with the archive.
FITS headers carry FILTER, EXPTIME, XBINNING, OBJECT and DATE-OBS precisely so software does not have to guess, and iTelescope fills them in properly. The pipeline opens each frame and asks. Filter aliases are mapped, so H-alpha, Halpha and HA all resolve to Ha.
The colour scheme is then derived from what is present rather than assumed: LRGB, RGB without luminance, SHO, HOO, or mono. That is what lets one command handle a galaxy in LRGB and a nebula in narrowband without being told which is which.
2026-07-21: push-button imaging, hand-driven science
The imaging half - unzip, measure, register, stack, plate solve, compose - is mechanical and should run unattended on any session. The analyses are not: a globular cluster survey suits an elliptical galaxy and is meaningless for an emission nebula, and much of the value in the NGC 5128 work came from noticing when a result was wrong rather than from running the code. So the pipeline is being built to be push-button, and the science stays step by step.
2026-07-21: merge itelescope and astro-pipeline into one repository
The two were split by accident of chronology rather than by design. itelescope
began as a reference to the telescope network and grew into the campaign that
books and runs sessions; astro-pipeline was created three hours before this
merge to hold the processing code once it was moved out of the image directory.
They describe two halves of one activity, and the seam was already leaking: the
campaign's TODO referred to processing results held in the other repo, and the
processing code's README explained a campaign it did not contain.
Merged with both histories preserved, by relocating each repository's files
into a subdirectory in its own history first and then merging the unrelated
histories. 44 commits, and git log --follow still traces a file across the
move.
Layout: itelescope/ for the network and campaign, pipeline/ for the code,
observing/ for in-person plans, with the Default Workflow files (CLAUDE.md,
docs/, state/) at the top level governing the whole repository.
The old repositories are not deleted. The drain campaign is live until
10 Aug with sessions running most nights, and other sessions may be working in
itelescope at the moment of the merge. Both carry a notice pointing here.
Archive them once the campaign closes, not before.
2026-07-21: image data does not live in the repository
A single calibrated frame is 61 MB and a session runs to several gigabytes.
Sessions stay on disk, organised into named subdirectories, and the code finds
them through the ASTRO_SESSION environment variable. Each session carries its
own METHODS.md describing what was done and what was found, so the account of
the data travels with the data while the code travels separately.
2026-07-17: follow the Google Sheet, not the support article
The support article (https://support.itelescope.net/support/solutions/articles/247371) and the maintained Google Sheet (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jZWkkjewOuyNC9YzQ8y2d0pO1e4T7EBeysmQMPBVSOk/) disagree: the article lists T9, T19, T31, T69, which the sheet omits; the sheet has T25, T26, T59, T71-T75, T80, which the article lacks. The article itself points to the sheet as the current source, so the review follows the sheet and notes the discrepancy. The sheet CSV export is snapshotted in data/ so the review's numbers remain reproducible even if the sheet changes.
2026-07-17: single review document, not per-telescope files
23 active scopes each need only a spec block and a short assessment; one TELESCOPES.md grouped by observatory reads better and is easier to keep current than 23 stub files. Revisit if per-scope content grows (photos, session logs).
2026-07-17: no launchpad scraping
https://go.itelescope.net/ is an authenticated app shell with no public data. All content comes from public support pages and the public sheet; nothing in this repo requires iTelescope credentials.
Per-telescope detail pages, if ever needed: support.itelescope.net/support/solutions/articles/231901-231920 (older scopes), 245471 (T68), 251171 (T70), 251556 (T69), 251589 (T19).