Skip to content

NightScribe 0.1.1

Choose a tag to compare

@github-actions github-actions released this 19 Oct 17:56
· 21 commits to main since this release

Fixes photometry on normalised plates (the 32-bit float masters with values
from 0 to 1 that PixInsight and Siril write by default) and a track & stack run
that died without saying why.

Fixed

  • Comparison stars are found again on a normalised plate. The validation of
    each candidate mixed units: it read the signal from the plate (0 to 1) and
    computed the noise with the CCD equation, anchored in electrons per ADU. The
    read-noise term, which does not scale with the plate, drowned the signal and
    every candidate was refused as "SNR 0 in the aperture", so the proposal
    came back empty. Measured on a real plate (a magnitude 20.5 NEO, 10 s frames):
    0 comparisons before, 8 plus the check star after.
  • The error bar is the right one again on those plates. The same mismatch
    made the magnitude error of a real star come out as 52 magnitudes where
    the honest answer is 0.012. And when measuring a series on a 2020
    transient's stacks, the stored points carried errors of 228 to 384
    magnitudes
    : the same point, with the fix, comes out at 0.09.
  • Both ceilings guard again on those plates. Saturation and the linearity
    limit are compared in ADU, so on a 0..1 plate they never fired: a peak of 0.9
    sailed past a 53 000 ADU limit without a word.
  • A target the plate cannot measure no longer kills the track & stack run.
    The path that measures the target on its own stack and the comps on another
    multiplied the target's centroid by the plate scale, and a target that cannot
    be measured comes back with a None centroid: the run died with a TypeError
    instead of reporting the reason it already carried. Seen with two real
    objects, one of them forty pixels from the field's edge.

If you are still on 0.1.0 and hit this, the provisional way out is to
measure on a plate in ADU: the individual frames, or a master multiplied by
65 535 to give it its scale back. 0.1.1 no longer needs it.


Downloads

  • NightScribeSetup-0.1.1.exe: Windows installer (per-user, no admin rights needed).
  • NightScribe-0.1.1-windows-x64.zip: Windows portable build; unzip and run nightscribe.exe gui.
  • nightscribe_0.1.1_amd64.deb: Debian 13+ / Ubuntu 25.10+ (system Python; includes Find_Orb).
  • nightscribe-*.x86_64.rpm: Fedora 42+ / openSUSE Tumbleweed (system Python; includes Find_Orb).

Windows can stop the installer in two different ways, and only one has a way through. SmartScreen shows Windows protected your PC and offers More info -> Run anyway. Smart App Control (Windows 11, on by default on new installations) blocks unsigned code outright, with no such option: either turn it off under Windows Security > App & browser control > Smart App Control, or run NightScribe on another machine. The binaries are unsigned because NightScribe is free software and has no code signing certificate; the details are in docs/user/01-getting-started. Other distros (Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, ...) install manually: see docs/ASTROMETRY.

On Linux, installing the .deb from your Downloads folder can print an apt note about the sandbox user (permission denied, read as root instead): it is harmless and the install finishes.

The NINA/PINS integration is in test: it is there to be tried and to report what is missing, and the rest is planned for 0.2. CCDciel is the complete observatory backend today.

Report issues at https://github.com/irydeo/nightscribe/issues