Last update: October 6, 2009
kielkopf@louisville.edu
XmCCD uses Motif for its graphical user interface. The program has been built and tested with OpenMotif, and it should work equally well with LessTif. Most Linux distributions include one of these, but they may be built from source easily.
XmCCD would not be possible without the universal driver libraries from SBIG. While we have included a copy of the SBIG Linux Software Development package with the XmCCD source, the drivers and other useful links are available from SBIG.
The USB driver from SBIG requires fxload. It may be present as part of the hotplug support in a Linux system. The source is available for download from the Linux Hotplugging USB project on Sourceforge.
Image display for XmCCD is handled with SAOImage DS9, an astronomical data visualization application from the High Energy Astrophysics Division at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Images are stored as Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) files. CFITSIO is a library of C and Fortran subroutines for reading and writing FITS data files. The XmCCD distribution now includes programs for dark frame subtraction, flat field correction, and the extraction of spectra from CCD FITS images. The CFITSIO library is required to compile XmCCD and these utilities.
World Coordinate Systems are in included in the headers of FITS files to map the image pixels to the sky.
Astrometric calibration may be added by searching for known patterns of calibrating stars.
Subsequent image processing, including producing color images from exposures with different filters, can be done with CinePaint, free open source software derived from GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program. For astronomical image processing CinePaint offers 32-bit per channel depth, which allows processing to retain the full dynamic range in images from scientific CCD cameras. GIMP, which is often included in Linux distributions, will also work, but it handles and produces 8-bit image data. CinePaint now uses OpenEXR, a high dynamic-range image file format developed by Industrial Light & Magic for use in computer imaging applications. It depends as well on Little CMS (lcms), a speed-optimized color management engine. It is present in many Linux distributions, but a recent version may be needed to compile CinePaint from the source.
We maintain an archive for some of these programs. The files in this archive are the ones we have used to build and test XmCCD.
Last update: October 6, 2009
kielkopf@louisville.edu