Theo ten Brummelaar, Lewis Roberts, and I wrote a modest opus of code for AO data reduction and organization, spanning three AO systems (Mount Wilson NGS-AO, Starfire Optical Range, and AEOS). In an effort to disseminate this code (and other non-standard linkable libraries that we use) to the community, I have set up this anonymous ftp repository. The code is kind of a mixed bag at present, some distributed in tarballs, some in the form of RPM packages. This code is beta at best, so use at your own risk. If you are interested in this sort of thing, check back periodically. I will be updating and expanding the repository on a regular basis.
fitstars
fitstars is an iterative blind deconvolution image intensity
fitting program. It takes a FITS image and, with input from the user, will
calculate the relative intensity (magnitude difference) of the stars in the
field selected by the user. In addition, it will determine the astrometry. It
was originally written by Theo ten Brummelaar and could only deal with two
stars in the field. It was modified to deal with more than two stars and
packaged for general consumption by me.
mkdata
mkdata is a suite of programs designed to deal with calibrating
raw data from a CCD. The suite is able to make bias frames, dark frames, flat
frames, and calibrated (debiased, dark subtracted, flat-fielded, and
``shift-and-add''ed) data frames from the appropriate input raw FITS frames.
The programs in the suite are designed with batch processing in mind, but
there is a crude interactive mode. There are still some bugs in FITS header
bookkeeping when there are data frames from more than one object in a given
directory and wildcards are used.
nsimpleX
nsimpleX is Theo ten Brummelaar's simplified X ``toolkit''
library. It is able to display grey-scale images and various kinds of line
plots with a simple call. The CHARA Array control system makes extensive use
of the plot functionality. Both fitstars and mkdata
can make use of the grey-scale image display functionalities of
nsimpleX.
AO Utilities
This is the basic portal to the AO utilties. Here one can get to older
versions, find information about the non-GPL libraries we use, etc.
In late 1991, Don Barry and I got hold of an inexpensive frame grabber card and video camera that we were to integrate into a sub-system of Georgia State University's Multi Telescope Telescope (MTT). With the encouragement of our advisor, Hal McAlister, we hatched a plan to see if we could do speckle interferometry with these inexpensive components prior to them being installed in the MTT. In the GSU shop, I machined the hardware to hold the video camera, microscope objective, and the filter. Don translated the algorithm that he wrote for the CHARA speckle interferometry program to the horribly resource-strapped (by today's standards) 386 running DOS. It was quite a trick due to the nature of the DOS memory limitations, but Don managed to get a version which would process about every third frame through the DVA algorithm. We tested the setup first at the 1992 Winter Star Party in the Florida Keys using the 17-inch Newtonian scope of the (now defunct) Astronomical Society of the Atlantic. We also took data with an 8-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain and GSU's 16-inch Boller & Chivens scope. The results of this effort were a conference proceedings article, a sidebox to a popular article in Sky & Telescope, and finally, a chapter in an amateur astronomy handbook. Because of the Sky & Telescope article, a number of amateurs were interested in the DOS code that Don wrote. So, in early 1997, with Don's permission, I cleaned up the source code (added comments, got rid of superfluous variables, gave variables and subroutines more descriptive names, etc.) and packaged it for general comsumption. The result was SpekLite.