Astronomical Image Reduction TOOLSet
AIRTOOLS is a software for astronomical image reduction of both CCD and DSLR observations on Linux. A graphical user interface is build on top of command-line programs which combine a large number of tools readily available on most Linux desktops, including ImageMagick, GraphicsMagick, Netpbm, WCSTools, Gnuplot.
The primary intention of the software is the photometric analysis of comet observations. A new approach by means of large aperture photometry allows to measure the total coma brightness in a consistent way.
The underlying AIRTOOLS programs make use of powerful third party software commonly used in professional astronomy:
- SAOImage DS9: image display, catalog viewer and analysis GUI
- Astromatic software by E.Bertin: automatic source detection (sextractor), astrometric calibration (scamp), stacking (swarp), modeling (skymaker) and more
- Stilts by M. Taylor: powerful table processing
- Cexamples: basic FITS routines
Documentation
NEW (Sep. 2019): A preliminary user manual has been added. It features an in depth installation guide for all users, including those running a Windows or MacOS X operating system.
Video tutorials of typical AIRTOOLS sessions are in preparation. For illustrative purposes an older tutorial covering the comet extraction and photometry part using a previous AIRTOOLS version is still available here.