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Jocular: a tool for astronomical observing with a camera


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No, it doesn't lock it. BTW What OS are you using? There is a way to change the path in the next version but not currently.

I've had reports that some capture software (ASILive) doesn't write FITs directly to a specific folder but creates a subfolder within it. I wonder if this is happening here?

If you have a FITs file, you can test things out by just dragging them into the watched folder and Jocular should respond by loading them and displaying the image (assuming the FITs is well-formed).

Martin 

 

Edited by Martin Meredith
typo
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Using Altair Capture on Catalina, had some weird issue but is now writing to the directory, but the files are being put in the invalid directory. 

Covered in clouds so not a real test, and I know the  FITS output from Altair Capture may not be correct FITS spec, but can you please tell me the difference between ignore, invalid and unused? I didn't see it in the guide. Thanks

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0001.fitsi have attached a file, its blank, i.e just through the cam not attached to anything. And I do think that Altair Capture doesn't "officially" support FITS, so it may not be a true fits file, so more the fault of Altair Capture rather than Jocular. I was hoping it would just work but seems not. 

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Thanks. The FITs is actually fine (good news). It fails because it contains 3D data and I'm currently only handling 2D. I can handle 2D FITs that need debayering but not those that have already been debayered and saved in a single 3D FITs. It isn't hard to do and I'll add it to the next version -- just that this is the first time I've come across it. Meanwhile, is there an option in Altair Capture to save un-debayered?

Martin

 

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unfortunately it doesn't look possible as the Mac version of this tool is quite basic, and I can't see any option to do that. Would definitely be interested in the next version. I'm going to see if I can get oacapture to work and output FITS for LIveStacking in Jocular. I now use a Windows desktop mostly so don't have this issue at home, but I'm travelling next week and will take my Macbook and a lightweight mount. Altair support on Mac is there, but limited. Would be nice to get some combo working if I can. Will let you know if this works out. Thanks for your help so far!

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2 minutes ago, Gmx76 said:

unfortunately it doesn't look possible as the Mac version of this tool is quite basic, and I can't see any option to do that. Would definitely be interested in the next version. I'm going to see if I can get oacapture to work and output FITS for LIveStacking in Jocular. I now use a Windows desktop mostly so don't have this issue at home, but I'm travelling next week and will take my Macbook and a lightweight mount. Altair support on Mac is there, but limited. Would be nice to get some combo working if I can. Will let you know if this works out. Thanks for your help so far!

oacapture can certainly output FITS files, but I've never tried combining it with Jocular.  Do post about how you get on.

James

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That FITs output by oaCapture is also 3D (ie 1980 x 1080 x 3) so still not in the format Jocular can (yet) handle.

Martin

 

 
SIMPLE  =                    T / file does conform to FITS standard             
BITPIX  =                    8 / number of bits per data pixel                  
NAXIS   =                    3 / number of data axes                            
NAXIS1  =                 1920 / length of data axis 1                          
NAXIS2  =                 1080 / length of data axis 2                          
NAXIS3  =                    3 / length of data axis 3                          
EXTEND  =                    T / FITS dataset may contain extensions            
COMMENT   FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) format is defined in 'Astronomy
COMMENT   and Astrophysics', volume 376, page 359; bibcode: 2001A&A...376..359H 
DATE-OBS= '2021-05-27T09:54:55.306'                                             
DATE    = '2021-05-27T09:54:55' / file creation date (YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss UT)   
COMMENT Input Frame Format: RGB24 (24bpp colour)                                
XORGSUBF=                    0                                                  
YORGSUBF=                    0                                                  
FILTER  = 'None    '                                                            
SWCREATE= 'oacapture 1.8.0'                                                     
EXPTIME =                 0.01                                                  
ROWORDER= 'BOTTOM-UP'                                                           
Edited by Martin Meredith
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3 minutes ago, Martin Meredith said:

That FITs output by oaCapture is also 3D (ie 1980 x 1080 x 3) so still not in the format Jocular can (yet) handle.

I'm assuming that's because it's a colour frame.  Is there anything I can do to make that work with Jocular Martin, or is it just down to you finding time do what's necessary to handle that frame type?

James

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Thanks for the offer James. I'm not sure it is worth you making changes but perhaps oaCapture can already e.g. output the RGB as 3 separate frames, or output as a single 2D fits prior to debayering (I assume oaCapture is doing the debayering)? 

I'll push ahead with the next release and try to get it done in the next couple of weeks (its a rather large update, mostly completed, but many things have changed internally to handle the capture side so it needs a lot of testing by me before springing it on the world at large).

Martin

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  • 3 months later...

@Martin Meredith

I see some recent updates on GitHub.  What's the approved way of updating? (New season coming up!)

Incidentally, it would be nice to have a place in the app where you could see what version it actually is?  Perhaps it's there and I'm just missing it.

Thanks

Tony

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Last update was c 3 months ago after a lengthy diversion fighting a largely losing battle with ASCOM integration.... No major release ready just yet though there is a dev release (0.4.7.dev2) for the daring available via pip (features a more polished interface and configuration system and more watched folder options). Version does indeed appear (in title bar). Will return to the fray in early October once I've got a bunch of new lectures out of the way...

Martin

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OK, so the approved method is:

pip install jocular --upgrade

I think...?

 

17 hours ago, Martin Meredith said:

Version does indeed appear (in title bar).

Ah ha! ... I always use it full screen, so never saw that!!

Edited by AKB
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7 minutes ago, Martin Meredith said:

I believe the incantation is

pip install --upgrade jocular==0.4.7.dev2

cheers

Martin

Thanks, but strangely, the key part of your message appears as black.  HOWEVER, in the summary of the message, it *does* show as:

 pip install --upgrade jocular==0.4.7.dev2

 

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Hi,


I've just installed Jocular to see what it's like - but I can't get the example files to work.

I'm running version 0.4.5 on a Mac (Big Sur) and it doesn't seem to be picking up the files.

I've tried running

jocular --rebuildobservation

but it just errors out with

Error: no such option: --rebuildobservations

I've tried putting the sample files in different directories, but it doesn't seem to make any difference.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

-- Robert

image.png.2ffc761d3ff3721e28679c14d52d23a0.png

Edited by flyingbarron
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Hi Robert

Apologies. The documentation is a little out of sync with the versions. For v0.4.5 I removed the rebuild observations option because I'm introducing a cleaner way to do this in the next version and 0.4.5 was a step on the way to that. For the moment, if you delete previous_observations.json in your JocularData directory it will automatically rebuild. 

The directory structure you show above ought to work but if not I suggest clearing out the captures directory and generating a structure like this:

1103457339_Screenshot2021-09-08at13_41_47.thumb.png.daa60df409bf5562c929686a0735e3ba.png

There will be a completely new version with improvements to the installation side amongst others coming soon but I need to find the time to finalise it.

cheers

Martin

 

 

 

 

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13 minutes ago, Martin Meredith said:

For the moment, if you delete previous_observations.json in your JocularData directory it will automatically rebuild.

This solved the problem - Thanks very much! :)

Haven't had a chance to check anything else, but the directories now show up and I can see the basic visualization. I'll explore over the weekend.

-- Robert

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hi,

I've been experimenting with Jocular, just manually dropping FITs into the watched folder for now.   I'm planning to use it with a watched folder on my laptop in tandem with an Astroberry RPi on the mount taking the images.  Some random thoughts for what they're worth:

  • Jocular does a great job with the auto blackpoint!  I really like being able to switch the stretching algorithm.
  • My platesolving doesn't work until I increase the match threshold to 50 arc-seconds.  Probably user error, still experimenting.  
  • The GIF feature is super cool.  Annotations, too. 
  • Any chance using the Bottleneck library would speed up stacking a tad?
  • I'm using the software binning to reduce file sizes.  It might be nice if the settings for the current stack could be exported and run separately on the original FITs to produce a full-size image to save for fame, fortune, etc.  
  • The LAB sliders (G<->R, B<->Y) are a bit small and fiddly.  

Eventually, I might use a standalone Python script to retrieve the files from the Astroberry RPi and then preprocess them a bit, say setting a FWHM rejection level, before sending them to the watched folder.  

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Hi Steve

Thanks for your feedback.

If you're still having issues with platesolving (50 arcsec seems like a lot) feel free to send me a FITS file and let me know your focal length and I'll see if I can solve it.

Stacking itself is fast but the star extraction is the bottleneck. In the current version I also apply some edge processing to remove artefacts that occasionally fooled the platesolving algorithm, but in the next version I've redesigned things so that the edge processing is no longer needed, which improves the speed by quite a bit. I'll look into the Bottleneck library though. (I'm using scikit-image for most of the compute-hungry image processing steps).

Re exporting the settings: I'll think about this. Some settings are saved with the object and in the past I saved more, but it turned out to be pretty fast to 're'-explore the observation on reload. I'm trying not to cater for too much generality as this is meant to be mainly a live EEA tool with the option to revisit captures rather than a more generalised AP tool, for which there are much better options (I imagine -- I don't do AP myself).

I end up not using the LAB sliders at all because the colour balance of the background sky is nearly always spot on, so I'm wondering whether they're very useful anyway. The reason the background is pretty much OK (for me at least) is because I'm subtracting an estimate of the colour gradient from each colour stack, which does a reasonable first order job with background colour balance. You'll note that there are no histograms -- I don't think they're needed when you use automatic background estimation. But in any case making them a little larger isn't too hard.

Cheers

Martin

 

 

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