Munipack is a general astronomical image processing software focused on processing of any kind of observed image data.
Munipack project has been started on Masaryk University at 1996. A primary idea has been to prepare a batch processing software for huge amount of our CCD data. As the photometry core the source codes of DAOPHOT II implemented by Midas has been selected. Just only star detection and the aperture photometry routines has been used because ones did not require any user interaction, the key feature for non-iterative analysis.
The original code has been arranged to work as a separate tool (without Midas environment). Parameters and data files has been not altered (ones are identical up today in obsolete 0.4.2 version.
Additional utilities has been added to provide all facility for extraction of light curves of variable stars from the images. The matching of on-image star lists has provided a way to find an affine transformation between images vice versa. The utilities enabled construction of light curves. The basic image reduction (dark and flat corrections) has been also added. The work has been published under both Unix (Linux and Solaris) and MS-DOS operating systems during 1997.
1998 and 2000 improvements included the creation of robust creator of flat-field from series of images (with mean and sigma normalisation). The important change in algorithms has been realized. Also main part of code has been adjusted for Fortran 90 compilers. The implementation has been improved to use of dynamical arrays, rewrote routines to use memory instead of disk-buffers and massive speed up. The robust algorithms on base of the likelihood methods with non-Gaussian distribution functions replaced the DAOPHOT distribution filtering methods.
The 2000-late improvements included image summing utilities which provides composition of images and deep-field imaging and precise photometry of combined images. The period has been characterized by slow progress, bug-fixing and perfecting of the application.
The new era of Munipack started on begin of 2009 when the plan for GUI, modernization and improvements has been started. As the part of the work are sentences which your are reading.
Copyright © 1997-2011, F. Hroch (✉, Blog⤴), DTFA, Masaryk University.