The fitsblink
program will in principle run on a PC 486, 8 MB
of RAM, 1024x768 pixel graphics card and 15'' color monitor. It will
be rather slow, however, and the amount of images loaded at one time
will be limited. The recommended configuration is Pentium 200 MHz, 32
MB RAM, 1280x1024 video card and 17'' monitor or better.
Other platforms: any equivalently powerful Unix workstations should be
good enough. However, it is up to you to obtain appropriate libraries
and compile the program. Fitsblink
uses cfitsio 1.42
and xforms 0.88
libraries. Please do not attempt to use any
earlier versions of these libraries because the program will not work
with them. Note that I didn't even attempt to compile
fitsblink 2.0
on any other platform.
To do astrometry, you also need CD-ROMs with GSC 1.1 star catalog and/or USNO SA 1.0 catalog. In principle you can also have exact copies of these catalogs on hard disk, if you wish to avoid mounting and unmounting of CD-ROM drives and your hard disk is big enough.
You can get the compiled program for the Linux system on
http://kronos.ijs.si/~jure/fitsblink/fitsblink.html.
Sources of fitsblink
are available at
http://kronos.ijs.si/~jure/fitsblink/fitsblink.html.
You can find the cfitsio 1.42
library at
ftp://legacy.gsfc.nasa.gov/software/fitsio/c/
and the xforms 0.88
library at
http://bragg.phys.uwm.edu/xforms.
If you really want to compile fitsblink
by yourself, make sure
that you install these libraries properly. Then edit the
makefile
and enter proper paths for include files and
libraries. You also need to change C
compiler switches if you
don't use GNU C
. Then type make and hope for the best. If you
succeed in compiling fitsblink
for some other platform and you
wish to share the binary code with other people, you are welcome to
send it to me and I will add it to the fitsblink
home page.
When you get a working binary, you can install it to a directory which
is listed in your path, for example /usr/local/bin
. When you
run fitsblink
for the first time, it will complain about not
finding a parameter file. Just proceed with the program and choose
the Settings item in the Astrometry menu.
Write in your default settings and press the Save button. A
file which contains your settings is named .fitsblinkrc
and is
written to your home directory. For those less familiar with Unix,
files starting with a dot are ``hidden'', i.e. normally not shown by
the ls
command.
The user manual (this one) serves also as the help file. It is a good
idea to put it to some known place, such as
/usr/local/lib/fitsblink
.
You can install the fitsblink
program (default location
/usr/local/bin
) and user manual (default location
/usr/local/lib/fitsblink
by typing make install
. You
must be root for this.
After erasing images from the memory sometimes a segmentaion fault appears. This bug appears relatively infrequently and is difficult to reproduce. Actually it has not happened for some two month now and maybe it is gone now. Nevertheless, the author would be grateful on any documented example how to reproduce this or any other bug reliably.
You can't use USNO catalog on big-endian computers.