luca-penasa / circle-craters

A planetary science crater-counting plugin for QGIS

circle-craters

this is an initial porting of the plugin to qgis 3.x. be aware that most of the details in this readme do not apply at the present state. But the plugin can still be safely placed in the local qgis plugin directory and tested out. I recommond using the system variable QGIS_PLUGINPATH, and point that to the parent folder of the source code of this plugin, which must be named "circle-craters"

A crater-counting python plugin for QGIS.

Current Status: In Testing

Written for and tested on QGIS version 2.6 (Brighton).

Features include:

• Flexibility to crater count in a GIS environment on Windows, OS X, or Linux
• Free software: BSD license
• Three-click input defines crater rims as a circle
• Projection independent

Details

• This QGIS plugin is designed to offer an open source alternative to the craterTools plugin for ArcGIS.
• Crater counting is a technique used by planetary scientists to estimate the age of a surface.
• Collaboration is welcome! Please see the Issues page and the CONTRIBUTING.rst file.
• CircleCraters was initially presented at the 2015 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference
• This plugin will be submitted to the QGIS plugin repository.
• At this time the plugin does not work properly on QGIS 2.8 (Wien)

Installation

1. First install QGIS.
2. Download the contents of the git repository using the git clone command or downloading a zipfile.
3. Use the makefile to compile and copy the files to the QGIS plugin directory (run make deploy). The QGIS plugin directory should be in ~/.qgis2/python/plugins.

4. On the command line run:

   $ make deploy

5. You may get see the following error messages:

   make: pyrcc4: Command not found.

   If you see this message install the Python Qt4 developer tools by running:

   $ sudo apt-get install pyqt4-dev-tools

   Another commmon error:

   make: sphinx-build: Command not found

   If you see this message install the python sphinx library by running:

   $ sudo apt-get install python-sphinx

6. Enable the plugin from the QGIS plugin manager. Go to Plugins > Manage and Install Plugins. This will connect you to the official QGIS plugin repository, but also searches the QGIS plugin directory on your machine for plugins. Find Circle Craters in the list and select the checkbox to the left of the name.

Installation Tips for QGIS

Instructions on QGIS.org. Hopefully this encourages you to try out QGIS if you have not used it before for planetary data!

Alternate Install For Mac OSX:

The QGIS website links to a set of Mac OS X installers for QGIS. An alternative is to use Homebrew.

1. Install Homebrew
2. Install GDAL with home brew
3. Install Qt with home brew (remember to link, QGIS 2.6 uses Qt version 4.8 at this time)
4. Install Pyqt with home brew
5. Install Numpy with home brew
6. Install Matplotlib with home brew
7. Install QGIS. Note: The brew/science tap is not the most stable tap for QGIS. It is recommended to use this tap.

Contributing

Feedback, issues, and contributions are always gratefully welcomed. See the contributing guide for details.