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I have done almost exactly what Taichi suggests and my reasons were almost the same. There is a semi-automatic telescope at Brno observatory capable to get images of 50 stars in 4 hours, 3 frames in each VRI passband. Leaving aside that processing such a heterogenous dataset (each triplet of images needs different combination of dark frame, flat field a comparison stars) is _very_ time consuming, there is a lot of place for user errors. The process is highly repetitive and you can easily mistake comp magnitudes, filter designation etc. About 95% of images are processed without any error written on the screen. Concerning difficulty of writing, it was quite easy. Because I am not any kind of highly skilled computer programmer and I realised that the worst point are photometrical routines, I "looted" a great piece of software - MUNIPACK - for FITS operations, aperture photometry and catalogue matching and wrote Perl scripts to operate on inputs and outputs. The whole code constitutes of approx. 1700 lines with commentary and it took me some 50 hours of time to write it (including beta testing). (there is a Czech proverb "Measure twice, cut once" so I spent hours just thinking about the problem without doing actually anything :-)) The software fits perfectly needs of me and my collegues. However, I have serious doubts if it would fit needs of other people. Everyone's got a different camera, different style of observing, different requests on output format. Creating such a system for general use is almost impossible. Maybe there should be some general rules and suggestions (or even pieces of code) so everyone is able to write his own software? Regarding sequences and comparison stars - it took me another 50 hours to select comparison stars for some 60 fields. And I will spent further time to check it - due to my past experiences I won't dare to send data without checking comp stars and identifications. There are other things, which should be included in such software. One might measure all stars in the FOV and discover a lot of new variable stars. Or it is possible to measure sky brightness and follow light pollution in your area (there are not many such measurements - astro-ph/0301115). Best regards, Ondrej Pejcha
Return to the Powerful Daisaku Nogami
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