Remote imaging, processing pipeline, and observing plans. Merged from itelescope + astro-pipeline.
laurence
38f7a81395
run.py is the one command the whole exercise was aimed at:
python run.py --all PATH
It finds every session beneath a directory and takes each through
ingest, measure, register, solve, colour and report. Stages are skipped
when their output already exists, so an interrupted run continues rather
than restarting, and --force overrides that.
A failure in one stage of one session does not stop the others. In a
batch of twenty the useful outcome is nineteen results and one clear
error, not nothing - so failures are caught, recorded and summarised at
the end, and the plate solve in particular is allowed to fail without
taking the images down with it. An unsolved session still produces a
perfectly good picture; it just cannot produce positions.
report.py writes each session its own METHODS.md, generated from what
the stages actually returned rather than from what they were supposed to
return. That matters for the honest parts: a session whose plate solve
failed says so in its own documentation, and the limitations section is
derived from the data - too few frames for outlier rejection, an
integration too short to recover, a missing luminance channel, seeing
that caps the achievable detail. A hand-written note is written once and
then rots; this is rebuilt on every run.
|
||
|---|---|---|
| docs | ||
| itelescope | ||
| observing/eclipse-2026-menorca | ||
| pipeline | ||
| state | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| CLAUDE.md | ||
| README.md | ||
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.