XmCCD Camera Control Supporting Software

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 Motif, but it may be built from source easily.

• Official home page for the OpenMotif development project

XmCCD for SBIG would not have been possible without the universal driver libraries from SBIG. We have included a copy of an archival SBIG Linux Software Development package with the XmCCD source, other useful links are available from SBIG's Support page accessible here

• SBIG homepage

The curren driver allows full use of older ST and STL cameras.

The USB driver from SBIG requires fxload. It may be present as part of the hotplug support in a Linux system, or quickly installed as a package. The source is available for download from the Linux Hotplugging USB project on Sourceforge.

• FXLOAD from USB hotplug support

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.

• SAOImage DS9

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.

• CFITSIO from NASA's High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC)

World Coordinate Systems are in included in the headers of FITS files to map the image pixels to the sky.

• WCSTools from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory Data Center

Astrometric calibration may be added by searching for known patterns of calibrating stars.

• Astrometry.net

Subsequent image processing, including producing color images from exposures with different filters, can be done with the open source GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program. AstroImageJ, our astronomical version of ImageJ, offers broad image processing functionality and user-supported plug-ins. Some command line processing is available in our Alsvid Python package.

• AstroImageJ
• ImageJ
• Alsvid