Plotting from collect_stars.pl

["Knowles, Richard (CORP, Consultant)" <Richard.Knowles@corporate.ge.com>]

All,

Tom Droege recently announced a program he has released to compile star
listings into groups of measurements.  This program takes the calibrated
star files from the Michael Richmond's pipeline, and collects them into sets
of measurements.

As I manually reviewed the event files and making individual plots as I
went, it hit me that there "has to be a better way" to speed this process
up.  As a result I began working on code to accomplish this.

I wanted to be able to step forward through the file, trigger a plot with
the minimum number of keystrokes and to save interesting groups of
measurements to an external file.  Over the past couple weeks, and with
Tom's help as a guinea pig, the program has been improved to the point where
it is usable (but not perfected I'm afraid).

I know a number of people are working on datasets, and so I've decided to
release this code for folks to play with as the process of improvement
continues.

This first version should be considered "alpha" code, and in some areas is a
little flakey.  Nevertheless, it will definitely speed up the process of
reviewing star files, and hopefully make things less tedious.  It can be
found at:

        http://a188-l009.rit.edu/tass/software/select/

There are two versions of this program depending upon platform differences:

		selectcy.pl		Cygwin/Wgnuplot version
		selectun.pl		LINUX version (successfully used on
Mandrake 7.2 and 8.2 systems).

As with any perl script, the programs can be invoked by:

		$ selectun.pl <starfile name>

Provided you have placed the program where it can be found by your default
path and have set the protections so it can execute directly (chmod +x).
When the program starts it will give you a prompt and wait for a command.
Prior to use you'll also have to edit the script to add your particular
default paths.  The prompt is configurable here also.

The command set is pretty minimal:

		a <cr>		Advance (forward) to a specific Star ID
		n <cr>		Show the next set of measurements
		<cr>		Show the next set of measurements
		p <cr>		Plot the current set of measurements
		s <cr>		Save the current set of measurements
		q <cr>		quit
		h <cr>		show some help

I've discovered on LINUX, after the plot has been displayed, it can be
closed by typing 'q', this will return you
to the command prompt for your next command.  Wgnuplot however isn't as
accomodating and you'll have to 
kill the plot window to return to the prompt.

Some further features planned are:

		o  Save the plot to an external file with a .png extension
(next item to be done)
		o  Move backwards in the measurements file
		o  Figure out how to deal with plotting small sets of data
separated by large blank periods
		    i.e. two nights measurements separated by a week of
nothing.  How to plot this such
		    that you don't have two small blips at ether end of a
blank diagram.
		o  Clean up behavior near the end of the file and with
shorter star files and extractions
		o  Change datasets mid stream
		o  Fix default paths to not need pre-configuration
		o  Write up some comprehensive documentation

Comments and suggestions can be sent to me at mailto:rknowles@woh.rr.com and
are welcome.

I hope this is a useful tool.

Rich Knowles
Oxford, OH
4/30/2002