Astrophotography Lab: New version released!

[Altais]

Hello fellow astrophotographers.

There has been a couple of years now since I released a piece of software called Astrophotography Lab, a tool for measuring your camera's sensor, exploring how differen parameters will affect your image, and a lot more. During these last couple of years I have been rather busy with my astrophysics studies, so there has been little time for further development on the program. However... *drumrolls*

...I am now pleased to announce that a new major release is ready!

The new version, APLab v0.4.0, has among other things recieved a new tool, the (rather boringly named) Field of View Calculator, which does exactly that. It calculates your field of view. It does a lot of other things as well though, like letting you choose a target and seeing how big it will appear in your image, as well as showing you different pieces of information about the target and what its location will be on the sky. The purpose of the tool is to give you an effective way of planning your imaging session by showing you the information that matters, and by utilizing the already integrated information about your camera and optics.

Astrophotography Lab has seen some other changes as well, like a greatly improved management of memory when loading images in the Image Analyser tool. Excessive memory usage was a problem with the earlier versions, but this has now been fixed by relying more heavily on storing temporary files to disk. Some less visible changes have also happened under the hood (like porting the code to Python 3), which should greatly facilitate further development.

 

Anyway, enough talk. Here are some screenshots from the new version:

 

 

 

The program is compatible with Windows and Linux operating systems (at the moment there is no OS X version, due to the simple fact that I don't own a Mac). You can find a download link and installation instructions on the APLab home site, where you will also find an in-depth user guide.

Let me know what you think, and don't hesitate to notify me of any bugs or problems.

(For other poly-forumists out there, I apologize for posting this same message on several forums, but I saw no reason to write separate announcements just for the sake of not repeating myself.)

Clear skies,
Lars

[fozzybear]

Hi

having problems on windows 7 pro, when running aplab.exe as admin get error message see attached file in pdf format

any help greatly appreciated

Andy

error.pdf

[Altais]

Hi Andy. Are you using a 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows? I might have to try compiling the executable a bit differently. 

[Altais]

11 hours ago, fozzybear said:

Hi

having problems on windows 7 pro, when running aplab.exe as admin get error message see attached file in pdf format

any help greatly appreciated

Andy

error.pdf

Andy, might I suggest that you try running the program in Windows 7 compatibility mode? Right-click on APLab.exe, select Properties, then click on the Compatibility tab. Mark the box saying "Run this program in compatibility mode for:",  then select Windows 7 in the drop-down menu. You could also try clicking on "Run compatibility troubleshooter" in the same window.

[fozzybear]

19 hours ago, fozzybear said:

Hi

having problems on windows 7 pro, when running aplab.exe as admin get error message see attached file in pdf format

any help greatly appreciated

Andy

error.pdf

Running windows 7 pro 32 bit version will try on my other machine running windows 7 pro 64 bit and reply later. tried compatibility mode but no difference

[fozzybear]

18 hours ago, Altais said:

Hi Andy. Are you using a 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows? I might have to try compiling the executable a bit differently. 

just an update tried on my windows 7 enterprise 64bit and works fine but it does not like windows 7 pro 32bit machine . hey do

[Altais]

2 minutes ago, fozzybear said:

just an update tried on my windows 7 enterprise 64bit and works fine but it does not like windows 7 pro 32bit machine . hey do

Very strange. The program is 32-bit and should thus be able to run on both 32-bit and 64-bit machines. I will look into it though.

[Altais]

By the way, I realized that guest users might not be able to see the link to the APLab home site in my signature. So here is the link: http://lars-frogner.github.io/Astrophotography-Lab/download.html

[fozzybear]

2 minutes ago, Altais said:

By the way, I realized that guest users might not be able to see the link to the APLab home site in my signature. So here is the link: http://lars-frogner.github.io/Astrophotography-Lab/download.html

I downloaded from your site which then redirected me to github.com so no problems their

[Altais]

I was able to borrow a 32-bit machine and tried building the executable on that machine, to avoid any unwanted 64-bit dependencies sneaking in. The aplab-v0.4.0-win-standalone.zip file has been updated with the new executable, which should now work on both 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows.

[fozzybear]

1 hour ago, Altais said:

I was able to borrow a 32-bit machine and tried building the executable on that machine, to avoid any unwanted 64-bit dependencies sneaking in. The aplab-v0.4.0-win-standalone.zip file has been updated with the new executable, which should now work on both 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows.

It works just re-downloaded standalone.zip and now works on win7pro 32bit so whatever you did it worked, Well done happy to help

[fozzybear]

Lars,

Mechanical engineers require software engineers to sort things out all the time.  Well done ,  being a hardware engineer know nothing about software engineering. excellent work. whatever you are doing in astrophysics hope you do well. hands up to you.

Andy

[Altais]

11 hours ago, fozzybear said:

Lars,

Mechanical engineers require software engineers to sort things out all the time.  Well done ,  being a hardware engineer know nothing about software engineering. excellent work. whatever you are doing in astrophysics hope you do well. hands up to you.

Andy

Thanks a lot Andy.  And thanks for the help identifying the issue. There is only so much testing I am able to do before releasing the software to the public, so system-dependent problems like these are bound to show up sooner or later.

[Altais]

I've now uploaded a new release (v0.4.1) that fixes some issues in version 0.4.0. See the readme for details. It's available from the APLab download page.

[daz]

Hi Lars

I had forgotten about this utility! Have downloaded the new version.

I have an error when using the FOV Tool when switching to M45 - Camera is the Atik 460EX and I entered my Esprit 100 details in - error log attached.

HTH!

errorlog.txt

[Altais]

11 hours ago, daz said:

Hi Lars

I had forgotten about this utility! Have downloaded the new version.

I have an error when using the FOV Tool when switching to M45 - Camera is the Atik 460EX and I entered my Esprit 100 details in - error log attached.

HTH!

errorlog.txt

Hey Daz, thanks for letting me know. I've looked into it and uploaded a fix (v0.4.2). It's available from the download page.

[daz]

Great support

[Stub Mandrel]

Hello Lars,

I have got very excited reading about APLab, but when I download the Windows zip file I keep getting a message that the zip folder is invalid (I'm using W10).

I haven't seen this error before (that I can remember) so s it possible the folder is corrupted?

The fefforts of all providers of free software like this are greatly appreciated and do much to help make the expensive hobby of astrophotography more affordable (and more fun).

Thanks

[Altais]

11 hours ago, Stub Mandrel said:

Hello Lars,

I have got very excited reading about APLab, but when I download the Windows zip file I keep getting a message that the zip folder is invalid (I'm using W10).

I haven't seen this error before (that I can remember) so s it possible the folder is corrupted?

The fefforts of all providers of free software like this are greatly appreciated and do much to help make the expensive hobby of astrophotography more affordable (and more fun).

Thanks

Hi Neil.

Thanks for notifying me of this. I also get the same error if I try to open the downloaded zip file in the file explorer. I haven't noticed this before because I normally use WinRar, which opens it without any problems. It also doesn't happen before the zip file has been uploaded.

I tried compressing the archives using 7zip instead of WinRar, and it seems to have worked. I've updated the download links with the new zip files. So just re-download the file and hopefully you'll be able to open it.

Let me know if things still doesn't work.

[Stub Mandrel]

Thanks Lars,

It's working now.

One question - how can I remove the light frame and replace it with another target without removing all the other frames?

[Altais]

59 minutes ago, Stub Mandrel said:

Thanks Lars,

It's working now.

One question - how can I remove the light frame and replace it with another target without removing all the other frames?

Right-click on the frame label, and it will become red (or green if it is selected). You can mark several frames for removal this way. Then right-click again on a marked frame and they will be removed. 

[Stub Mandrel]

Thanks Lars, that works too. May I suggest  a 'delete selected frame' button that has the same effect as right clicking twice? This would be more consistent with how other programs work and more intuitive.

 

Another question... how do I decide/ calculate a 'limit signal' figure for a target?

 

[Altais]

3 hours ago, Stub Mandrel said:

Thanks Lars, that works too. May I suggest  a 'delete selected frame' button that has the same effect as right clicking twice? This would be more consistent with how other programs work and more intuitive.

 

Another question... how do I decide/ calculate a 'limit signal' figure for a target?

 

Sure, that's a good idea. Thanks for the suggestion.

Specifying the "limit signal" tells the program the brightness of the brightest part of your target that you don't want to be overexposed (so for instance the bulge of a galaxy). You would typically compute this value using the Image Calculator and data from your image. To do this, draw a box around the relevant part of the image in the Image Analyser, then right-click and transfer the selection as target data to the Image Calculator. Also select and transfer a piece of the background (and if you want, data from a dark frame). Now go to the Image Calculator and calculate the corresponding brightness. It can then be transferred to the Image Simulator for use in computing recommended imaging settings. 

I hope that makes it a bit more clear.

[Stub Mandrel]

Thanks Lars,

It's an awful lot of unfamiliar concepts, but I think I'm beginning to grasp how I can use the program.

Obviously I need to get more familiar with it, but two things are interesting:

1) The 450D does not produce as much dark noise as I thought, for two minute subs at ISO800 the read noise is five times the dark noise, so increasing exposures up to 10 minutes with guiding should still give reasonable results.

2) It appears to confirm that ISO 800 is the optimum setting in most circumstances.

[Altais]

Hello everyone.

Several users of the Windows version of APLab have experienced that their anti-virus program quarantines the APLab executable and warns about a trojan or other malware having been detected. This is something I of course take very seriously. However, after doing a thorough examination of this issue, I can guarantee that these detections are false positives. There is absolutely no harmful software included in the distribution. The false positives were somehow caused by the software (called PyInstaller) that I am using for translating my source code into a binary file (APLab.exe) that can be  executed on any computer. After building the executable with a newer version of PyInstaller, all detections of harmful software were gone. I used an online service called VirusTotal for examining the files, which analyses the file using a large number of different anti-virus services.

I have updated the download link for version 0.4.2 with a standalone distribution that was build with the newest version of PyInstaller. To avoid any problems with your anti-virus program interfering with APLab, I recommend that you fetch this new release (here is a link to it). Note that I haven't had the opportunity to test this release on a 32-bit version of Windows, but I see no reason why it shouldn't still work. Let me know if you experience any problems.

Clear skies and happy Easter,
Lars