New Generation Release

I finished modernization of Munipack the engine during this spring. By the way, the incoming release fully replaces of the classic edition 2009. All the functionality is recovered again (and many many other is added).

All the current functionality has origin in all-inclusive representation of FITS (images has added all processed data as the additional HDU). On the base I prepared new versions of:

• astrometry,
• photometry,
• listing of data (star catalogues, light curves),
• composition of images.

The classic edition tagged as 0.4.2 is to be supposed obsolete now and its functionality is fully superseded.

Now, Munipack is prepared as to be suitable for regular data processing since this release. Please be careful, really extensive testing is still necessary!

Many of the implemented features has GUI unfinished (unprepared).

Astrometry

Astrometry part has been improved in many points:

• advanced GUI dialog,
• batch GUI dialog,
• the matching has been theoretically studied and the algorithm is practically developed from scratch,
• the robust fitting part has been improved by more simplifying and fine tuning of the algorithm,
• GUI contains visualization of matching:

Robust Algorithm

Very important improvement is included in the robust algorithm, the core of all robust estimation. Since this release, I used estimate of median by a fast algorithm by Dijskra (see Wirth (1976)) which can get n/2-th element of n sequence. One is excellent for many data (over twenty) but the ignorance of the correct definition of median (which is mean for even) has poor impact on estimate in case of a few points.

The algorithm of median (scatter) estimation is newly modified. For a few points, the median is estimated using of a sorted sequence (with sorting ~n*log(n) complexity) and the definition. For many points, the algorithm is unchanged and by using of the fast algorithm (with ~n complexity).

Results seems more precise and stable.

Localization

There is an unsolved problem with localization. Many my colleagues has installed localized version of a GNU/Linux distribution which is confused by a decimal dash (no decimal point) in real numbers so the underlying software (wxWidgets) must use locale rules to convert numbers to the right format. So I prepared a (untested) code to be locale-friendly.

Unfortunately, there is no complete solution of the problem. There are many examples where the points must be left: VO related and FITS header must contains only ASCII characters.

Other changes:

• HTML documentation updated to HTML5,
• Docs has been restructured and extended for description of completed features and tutorials,
• Helping utilities konve and picko has been removed from main tree and are available as independent applications (but included to binary version),
• backup strategy replaces FITS conventions and implements the standard GNU backup behavior,
• better processing of output filenames in batch,
• improvement and bugfix in displaying of images,
• created a photometry GUI dialog,
• rewrite of munilist (added listing of all objects,..) and kombine (works with spherical coordinates which enable geometrical transformations and mosaicking),
• updated for a new versions of g++/gfortran and wxWidgets,
• patchelf utility needed for binary distribution has been fully replaced by -rpath option,
• clarified verbose/pipelog prints.

Summer Plans:

• update GUI + add GUI for remaining features,
• a library for image/color processing (common to fitspng) (?),
• use slalib.

Acknowledgment

Many thanks for my students which has been first testing persons of new versions. Many errors has been identified and corrected during the testing period.