The software package C-Munipack presents the complete system for reduction of images carried out by CCD camera, oriented at the observation of variable stars. The specific programs of reduction process can be called from command line or via intuitive graphical user interface.
The project is based on the previous Munipack package, the programs have the same name, but contrary to Munipack, it is coded in C language and it contains a several new functions and tools in addition. Assignment of the command-line parameters and the configuration files is similar in both projects, exceptions are described in the project documentation.
Graphical user interface should be familiar for Munidos users, but it takes full advantage of graphical environment, and therefore the interface is more comfortable and enables user an improved control over reduction process in comparison with original interface of Munidos.
This package contains source code of The C-Munipack library. The library has powerfull application interface.
The following list is a short overview of some of the features that the C-Munipack software provides:
Conversion of CCD frames from several input formats (see below) into the standard FITS format.
Calibration of CCD frames; correction of observation time, bias-frame correction, dark-frame correction, flat-flat correction and heliocentric correction.
Aperture photometry using fully configurable set of apertures of different sizes.
Automatic finding corresponding stars on a set of frames.
Making light curves for selected stars; either differential curves or instrumental (row) magnitudes for further processing.
Semiautomatic detection of new and unknown variable stars on a viewfield.
Computation of air-mass coefficient.
Combining a set of bias, dark and flat frames into high quality master-bias, master-dark and master-flat correction frames.
Static or shared library with an extensive set of functions, that can be called using simple application programming interface.
A complete set of commands that can be used for automatic surveys.
The following input formats are supported:
The FITS format with many date and time formats.
The SBIG's ST-x compressed and uncompressed formats.
The OES Astro format
It doesn't control a camera or a telescope of any manufacturer.
It doesn't compute the absolute standard magnitudes of measured objects.
The project manager David Motl is also the author of the most part of the source codes. Some small pieces of the sources originate from Munipack package, coded by Filip Hroch. Algorithms for aperture photometry originate from Daophot software by P. B. Stetson. Munifind algorithm originates from Varfind tool coded by Lukas Kral.
The package uses the following third party software:
FITSIO library, written by Dr. William Pence, NASA
EXPAT library, written by James Clark's
GTK+ toolkit, developed by the The GTK+ Team
The project is hosted by the SourceForge. The latest verion of the binaries, source codes and documentation are available on the following address:
http://c-munipack.sourceforge.net/
The main goals of this version are:
Rewrite the Muniwin in a portable way.
Change the API to get rid of using static data.
Take advantage of multi-core processors.
Replace the format of photometry files by an extensible format.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the LICENSE file for more details.