TASS Astronomical Reduction Pipeline
Michael Richmond
May 16, 2003
May 19, 2003
Mar 27, 2005
The Amateur Sky Survey
(TASS) is a collaboration of amateur and professional astronomers
who have built their own instruments to measure relatively
bright stars (between magnitudes V = 7 and V = 13 or so).
We are processing much of the raw data through
a suite of software written specifically for this project.
The suite contains several different packages,
but we use the name TARP to describe the entire ensemble.
You can remember this acronym as
- Tass Astronomical Reduction Pipeline, or
- Tom's Astronomical Reduction Pipeline
The pieces which make up TARP are
-
XVista,
low-level image processing routines for subtracting
darks, creating flats, performing aperture photometry, etc.
- bait,
programs to read and write data to and from FITS headers
- match,
code for astrometry
-
photom,
which does photometric calibration. This package requires
an external library,
the GNU Scientific Library.
-
pipeline,
scripts written in TCL to control the overall processing
You can find a detailed description of the steps by
which raw images are gradually turned into a catalog
of stars with proper positions and magnitudes in
the pipeline documentation.
Yes, it is somewhat awkward that the same word "pipeline"
may be used to describe both the high-level scripts,
and the entire collection of all packages (as in "TARP").
Alas, I don't how to avoid this confusion.
Please let me know if you do.
Official TARP releases
For future reference, we list here the combinations of packages
which go into each of the official TARP releases.
- TARP 1.3 (released in Mar 27, 2005)
-
- TARP 1.2 (released in May 19, 2003)
-
- TARP 1.1 (released in May 16, 2003)
-
- TARP 1.0 (released in late April, 2003)
-
Last modified 3/27/2005 by MWR