doc updates

docs/makingmovies.rst

@@ -8,22 +8,82 @@ Making movies from |hiper| data
 *******************************
 
 The |makemovie| command allows you to generate stills from a movie. It
-is however painful to use and even more to actually compile, so this
-is just to provide an easy reminder.
+is a little painful to run and even more so to actually compile the
+stills into a movie, so this is just to provide an easy reminder.
 
 Making the stills
 =================
 
-TBD
+|makemovie| can plot CCD images only or images plus a light curve if
+you have a |reduce| log file available. I would suggest that you
+either run it within an empty directory or create such a directory for
+directing the output since it will create one image per
+exposure. Start by creating just a few images and look at them with
+your favourite PNG viewer. You will need to spend a while tweaking
+things. The one thing that will change when you switch to a full run
+is the X-scale on the light curve plot since that is adjusted to fit
+the times of the images shown. You can adjust the apparent font size
+by altering the plot width and height, at the same time as the dpi to
+control the resolution. Crude, but it works. I haven't got it working
+without rather a stack of "whitespace"; something for the future.
+
+Here is a full listing of parameters I used to make a movie of the
+eclipsing double white dwarf ZTF J1539+5027. In this case I was in the
+directory containing the reduce log within which I had created an
+empty directory "tmp". One up from the working directory was where the
+raw data, run0005.fits sat.
+
+.. code-block:: console
+
+  makemovie
+  source = hl
+  run = ../run0005
+  first = 2
+  last = 1000
+  trim = False
+  ccd = 2
+  bias = bias3x3_slow.hcm
+  flat = none
+  defect = none
+  log = run0005.log
+  targ = 1
+  comp = 2
+  ymin = 0.0
+  ymax = 0.05
+  ynorm = [1.0]
+  yoffset = [0.0]
+  location = e
+  fraction = 0.55
+  lpad = (0.15, 0.2, 0.1, 0.15)
+  cmap = viridis
+  width = 12.0
+  height = 3.0
+  dstore = tmp
+  ndigit = 4
+  fext = png
+  msub = False
+  iset = d
+  ilo = [0.0]
+  ihi = [100.0]
+  xlo = 0.0
+  xhi = 2048.0
+  ylo = 0.0
+  yhi = 1024.0
+  dpi = 200
+  style = dots
+  ms = 2.0
+
 
 Making the movie from the stills
 ================================
 
-I use 'ffmpeg' to make the movie with a command like::
+Once you have the stills, you still need to actually make the movie. I use the command 'ffmpeg' to do so like this:
 
   ``ffmpeg -start_number 123 -i run0005_%04d.png -c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p movie.mp4 -y``
 
-which would find any files of the form 'run0005_0340.png' starting from 'run0005_0123.png'.
+which would find any files of the form 'run0005_0340.png' starting
+from 'run0005_0123.png'. 'ffmpeg' has a million-and-one options and
+there be ways to tweak it, but this does a reasonable job I find.
 
 
 

docs/observers.rst

@@ -25,3 +25,4 @@ underlying principles, which contains further tips on good practice.
    photometry
    organisation
    checklists
+   setup