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Anyone here willing to help me test my project?

larrylart

By larrylart
in Imaging - Discussion

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larrylart

larrylart

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Hi,

I started this project back in 2004 as I realize that more and more people get into astrophotography but most will go no further then framing nice pictures. So I thought that it will be good to have a simple to use tool to allow amateur astronomers to do plate-solving(detect and match your image against star catalogs), so they can explore and learn more about these marvelous images so I started to develop this project. Now after literally tens of thousands of development hours you can just load your astrophoto and in a few clicks learn almost everything is known about your image, what are the stars, galaxies, nebulas, radio sources, x-ray/gamma bursts, supernovas, extra solar planets or asteroids, comets and even artificial earth satellites passing through. Also, you can get more advanced information like various measurements available (including spectral) and links to articles/abstracts talking about objects and/in that area in the sky.

On top of that I added several tool to help amateur astronomer to better plan his observing session like an on click collection of environmental/weather data, instruments management/control and also an online collaboration interface to allow amateur astronomers to easily exchange/review the data.

You can check a preview of my project at: UniMap - tool used for star identification in astrophotography

Anyone interested to help me test it and/or feedback will be appreciated!

Larry

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larrylart

larrylart

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Thank you all for your interest!

What are the requirements for running it ?

OS wise: from windows 2000 up. There are some problems with vista but these refer only to the camera interface and I will be looking into these soon to get them fixed. Also, I have not test it on windows 7 but I reckon it should work for most of the functionality – in the very worst case scenarios you will encounter the same camera problems as in vista and if so I will fix it as soon as I will get a test platform up for that operating system.

Memory(RAM) wise – you will need at least 100Mb free for an average sized image. For very large images you will need a lot more – I will be looking in optimizing the ram usage in the future but as you might reckon that will cost you in processing time.

As for CPU, I test it even on an old laptop of mine running on a 450Mhz processor and it’s usable.

Larry

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larrylart

larrylart

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Did you get my email on dependencies etc? (e.g. .NET/ASCOM etc)

No email or it got misplaced ... I will check.

The project is written in c++/wxwidgets (cross platform gui library) and that means it can be compiled on other platforms such as linux/mac/etc. Most functionality will work except for the digital cameras interface (and for Mac I am not sure about the video interface either) which is for the moment is windows only.

I tried to stay away from windows specific dependencies as I intent to release it on linux or perhaps mac osx as well. There is no .NET dependency. I use ASCOM indeed but I also wrote some of my own “drivers” in standard c++ but just for Meade, Celestron telescopes and JMI focusers.

Larry

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larrylart

larrylart

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Nice

check your PM on this forum

Got it ! :D

And I forgot something to mention here … my future plans with this project is to release it free and opensource (for windows, linux and perhaps macosx)… if all goes well, I mean if people show interest in it and it’s workable and from there I might be looking for sponsorship at some point to support a big central database though which amateur astronomers from all over the world can share image resolved with astrometry data etc.

Larry

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