PinPoint 5.2 Release Notes

The 5.2 release is a general maintenance release.

What's New in 5.2?

• Temporarily, for the UCAC3 catalog the J/K/Aperture magnitudes are exposed through PlateStar's BlueMagnitude, UltravioletMagnitude, and InfraredMagnitude properties, respectively. THis is a havk for special customers who are doing their own scripting. In a future major update, additional magnitude properties will be added to the API.

What's Changed in 5.2?

• The constant for conversion from Km/sec to AU/year (used in proper motion corrections) was revised slightly. You probably won't ever see the difference.

PinPoint 5.1b Release Notes

The 5.1b release contaions two changes. One is a fix for an obscure bug (an edge-condition) reading the UCAC3 catalog. The other is an invisible change to the licensing code which adds compatibility with a new key format being introduced in the upcoming ACP 6.0 release. This latter change will not affect current PinPoint users.

PinPoint 5.1a Release Notes

The 5.1a release of PinPoint is identical to 1.5, except a very obscure bug in the PinPoint engine has been fixed. The problem will be seen only if the file path or name in a call to Plate.WriteFITS() contains parentheses. This was caused by a feature of the CFITSIO library which uses parentheses in the output file name to trigger a special template file mode. This feature is not needed (and not wanted) for PinPoint. The logic in CFITSIO has been disabled.

PinPoint 5.1 Release Notes

The 5.1 release of PinPoint adds support for the USNO CCD Astrograph Catalog Version 3 (UCAC3). In addition, a number of issues with the engine and the Visual PinPoint application have been addressed. The Catalog Checker now supports UCAC3 as well. The engine has been recompiled under the Microsoft C++ 9.0 system (VS 2008), improving speed via additional code optimization.

What's New in 5.1?

• The USNO CCD Astrograph Catalog Version 3 (UCAC3) catalog is now supported in all components (engine, Visual PinPoint, and Catalog Checker).
• PinPoint LE now allows ACP Planner to use it.

What's Changed in 5.1?

• Visual PinPoint's catalog settings are now correctly saved when changed. Other quirks with the catalog settings have also been corrected.
• Visual PinPoint's Solve, Asteroid, and Supernova report files are now saved in My Documents, as needed for new security in Windows Vista and 7.
• The maximum box size for the Mighell Box centroider has been increase to handle large scale images.
• V magnitude is now given for UCAC2 catalog, it is R + 0.4, completely bogus but needed. This fixes problems with Visual PinPoint asteroid searching.
• Corrected FITS comments on TEMPERAT and CCD_TEMP.
• Corrected FITS FWHM field, was reading out temperature, now reads FWHM.
• The maximum limits for the aperture (pixels) have been increased to 20 for the inner and 60 for the outer.
• Visual PinPoint now starts up on the second monitor if previously shut down on second monitor. Was popping an overflow message on start.
• Documentation for Plate.SynthesizeStarfield() has been corrected.
• Dropping a non-FITS file onto the Asteroid Search list no longer causes a VPP fatal error. An error box is popped and the file is ignored.
• The Visual PinPoint Asteroid Setup tab no longer permits the temporary designation to be empty. It must be a letter A-Z.
• The Visual PinPoint sample images for asteroid and supernova searching are now properly installed by the setup package.
• Visual PinPoint now has a distinctive icon (about time!).
• The registration applet now takes the date in three numeric parts. This should eliminate confusion when entering dates with varying locales.
• FITS HISTORY comment for plate solving has been corrected when using the UCAC2 catalog (and for the newly supported UCAC3 catalog).
• The "too few stars" error message has been corrected to say that it could be too few image or catalog stars.
• The "Preparing to Blink" window is no longer shown. It was not disappearing on some systems, for an unknown reason (could not repro here).
• The ReadMe file that comes with the asteroid hunting samples has been updated for the current engine's settings and Visual PinPoint output format.
• The Catalog Checker's report file is now created in My Documents, making it compatible with Windows Vista and 7.

PinPoint 5.0a Release Notes

The 5.0a release of PinPoint incorporates improvements in plate solving speed, reliability, and astrometric accuracy. In particular, the Mighell Box and Gaussian PSF centroid methods have been rewritten and now provide much better centroids. Also, the synthetic aperture centroider now produces better flux estimates for faint stars, leading to better magnitude tracking across the range of image star brightness. The engine has been recompiled under the Microsoft C++ 8.0 system (VS 2005), improving speed via additional code optimization.

What's Changed in 5.0a?

• Added code to handle DATE-OBS in FITS that contains hh:mm:60 in the time. This was causing the engine to raise an error.
• Added test for FocusMax.exe as one of the programs allowed to use PinPoint LE.

What's New in 5.0?

• The USNO B1.0 reference catalog is now supported. It may be accessed either from a local hard drive (requires 80 GB disk space), or via internet access (requires a live internet connection). See the Plate.Catalog property.
• The USNO NOMAD catalog is now supported. It is accessible only via internet access (requires a live internet connection). See the Plate.Catalog property.
• Magnitude and limiting magnitude calculations have been substantionally improved. Catalog tracking is much better especially at faint magnitudes.
• Plate solving speed and reliability has been improved. The new solving engine is also more robust in crowded fields or fields with large extended objects.
• A new property Plate.FullWidthHalfMax has been added, and this is now included in the FITS header as FWHM.
• A new property Plate.PositionAngle has been added, and this is now included in the FITS header as PA.
• The Plate.ImageArray property has been enhanced to that it can be set with a SafeArray of 32-bit integers or 16-bit unsigned integers as well as a SafeArray of Variants. This makes it easy to set the ImageArray property from .NET clients.
• Visual PinPoint now detects a blank Catalog Maximum Magnitude field and reports the problem instead of silently failing to solve.
• Catalog proper motions are now properly calculated for the exposure time.
• The Plate.AttachNoImage() method no longer allocates memory for the image array.
• PlateStar.MakeMPC() has been fixed to prevent occasional values of 60 minutes or 60 seconds in the MPC report.

What's Changed in 5.0?

• Attached or created plates must now include a valid Plate.ExposureStartTime property (used for proper motion calculations).

PinPoint 4.1 Release Notes

Visual PinPoint has been greatly improved for bulk/survey work. Many small improvements have been made in logic to improve reliability and speed.

Finally, it is possible to use Emmanuel Bertin's SExtractor as an alternative to PinPoint's internal object detector. This is completely integrated and ready to use upon installation of PinPoint. A new port of SExtractor 2.2.2 to Windows is included (you must use this). For more information on using SExtractor, see the documentation on the Plate.UseSExtractor property.

What's Changed in 4.1?

• PinPoint can now attach and plate-solve images in monochrome or 1-shot color with pixel formats of 8-bit unsigned integer, 16-bit signed and unsigned integer, 32-bit signed integer, and 32-bit IEEE floating point.
• A Guide Star Catalog Installer/Verifier is now included to assist in installation of the basic GSC catalog.
• Many "out of range" and "not set" errors are now raised with the explicit name of the property that is out of range or not set. This should aid in diagnosing client software problems.
• A new property PlateStar.ColorMagnitude has been added for 1-shot color images.
• A new FilterBand value ppCBand has been added, indicating that the "band" is 1-shot color.
• The maximum number of catalog stars has been increased from 16384 to 32768.
• PlateStar.MakeMPC() now knows how to encode numbered designations above 99999.
• The default value for Plate.MaxSolveStars is now 500 instead of 0 (=use all)
• The default value for Plate.MinimumBrightness is now 0 instead of 200
• The default value for Plate.SigmaAboveMean is now 3 instead of 4
• A new method Plate.SynthesizeStarfield() is provided to make it easy to generate solvable images from the reference catalog.
• A new method Plate.SimpleBackgroundMean() has been added. This is intended for use in determining the mean ADU in flat field images and not live astronomy images. It is far faster than the more complex Plate.ImageBackgroundMean(*) method, and does not compute the sigma.
• The star matching algorithm has been optimized in one area, providing greater performance on large starfields with no loss of accuracy or plate solving reliability.
• Documentation of default values for several properties has been corrected.

What's Changed in 4.0.2?

• License conflicts with PinPoint LE in MaxIm DL have been fixed.
• 6-star matches are no longer permitted. The minimum number of stars to match is now 7.

What's New in 4.0?

• It can handle more than three plates in a set for asteroid searching. The target must be detected on all plates to be accepted. If you want to use the strategy of m plates n at a time, you'll have to run each set of n separately, then combine the MPC reports using a sort tool that eliminates duplicates. Windows 2000 and XP have a sort command that will do nicely.
• For asteroid searching, all processing is performed on all plates before the blinking process is started. This eliminates the long waits between blink sets, reducing the human time needed to vet detections. You may discover that your system's disk space (virtual memory paging file usage) limits the number/size of the plates in a set. If you have a fixed size set for your paging file (Windows 2000 and XP have fixed sizes for this), try increasing the paging file allocation. Again you may find yourself short of disk space. Only the highest volume users should notice this. An alternative is to process your image sets in batches.
• A magnifying glass display has been added, allowing close inspection of the area around the mouse location. A slider has been provided that allows changing the magnification level.
• The blink window now has selectable color palettes. Look in the Blink Settings tab for this. The default Black Body palette is one that is frequently used by professional astronomers.
• A "Jedicke diagram" has been added to the blink window. This display allows rough classification of asteroids near opposition. For more information, see the topic Using the Blink Window in this help file. Basically, stuff inside the polygon near the point is main belt, other stuff is "interesting" (or a false detection!).
• The asteroid searching algorithm has been speeded up significantly via a new predictive search algorithm.
• Detection mark is now a cross-hair making it less likely to block out nearby objects.
• All detections are now displayed on the blink window, with the active one being a distinct color. As you add manual detections during blinking, the marked objects remain displayed so you can see where you have been.
• The window returns to the last area where you were marking after reporting a newly added object (instead of going back to the upper left corner).
• Plate solving max match residual, asteroid motion filter regression max residual, and all filter FWHM values are now in pixels. This makes it possible to solve and scan a wide range of images without changing any of these parameters since the plate-scale sensitive values are scaled by the plate scale.
• ACK and AC2 fields are now provided for the MPC report.
• Each catalog's disk path and maximum magnitude is remebered separately. Therefore, when switching between catalogs, the last used catalog path and mag setting will be automatically loaded. This makes switching catalogs much easier.
• A new high-precision option for reporting in MPC high-precision format has been added.
• A centroid method selector has been added, allowing you to experiment with PinPoint's 3 internal centroiding methods. You can also select to use Emmanuel Bertin's SExtractor to scan images instead of PinPoint's internal object detector. Use this only if you are willing to learn how to use SExtractor. It is much slower than PionPoint's internal detector.
• The manual blink tool is no longer supplied. You can put any number of images into Visual PinPoint (from one on up) and blink them, so the Blink tool is redundant.
• The source code to Visual PinPoint is no longer supplied. The program has morphed from a sample which shows how to use the engine into a serious application with considerable original work. I don't want to give away some of the techniques in this release. If you want the sources, and are willing to sign a non-disclosure agreement, I may consider providing them. In any case, I'll help you in any way I can to use the engine in your application.

Special Feature: Thanks to Dr. John McClusky of Texas Lutheran University, an experimental "trailed stars" fitting engine has been added to Visual PinPoint. It allows accurate plate solving of heavily trailed images (e.g., when using orbital tracking to follow up faint objects). It requires manual intervention during plate solving to pick a clean trail for generating a convolution kernel for the trail-to-point transform, so it cannot be used for fully automated operations. But follow up isn't really an automatic process anyway! If this works out, the code for the transform will be subsumed into the PinPoint engine in a later release.

• Persistent ImageStars collection. Once scanned, the ImageStars collection can be cached in a file. This eliminates the need for re-scanning when the images are used at a later time. See the info on the Plate.CacheImageStars property.
• MaxSolveStars property which allows you to specify only the n brightest stars be used for plate solving. This was added so that the plate can be scanned at maximum sensitivity once, then the cached star list used for solving. In the case of star-rich areas, the sensitive scan could produce way more stars than needed for solution and thus greatly slow the solution process. By limiting the stars used for solving to the n brightest, this problem may be easily overcome.
• The object detector now identifies and suppresses CCD saturation spikes. The entire star, including the saturation spikes, is eliminated from the detection list (stars that are so heavily saturated cannot be used for data). This greatly reduces the occurrence of false detections along spike and glint edges when scanning at high sensitivities.
• Many new properties have been added that map to commonly used/needed FITS header fields. See the New Properties list below and the new FITS Keyword Dictionary.
• All FITS header fields are now fully commented with info explaining their usage and units.
• New properties have been added that allow access to the overall and local image background statistics. See the New Properties list below.
• The Plate.ExposureStartTime property now supports millisecond resulution in the mapped FITS header DATE-OBS. It writes this in the ISO 8601 format. If the seconds value of the date time is integral (no fractional seconds) the milliseconds are supressed in DATE-OBS for maximum compatibility with programs that fail when parsing the full ISO format.
• FITS keywords RA and DEC are now accepted as synonyms for OBJCTRA and OBJCTDEC, respectively. Both are written out to files by Plate.UpdateFITS() and Plate.WriteFITS().
• A new FITS Keyword Dictionary has been added to this documentation package. This gives the FITS keywords that PinPoint uses, and the mapping of each to PinPoint properties
• A new method Plate.AttachNoImage() has been added. It allows attaching the FITS image without reading the image array. This is used to quickly read FITS header values and possibly modify the mapped properties for updating in the FITS header. Large images (2k x 3k) incur significant CPU overhead to read the array.
• Two new methods for writing to arbitrary FITS header fields have been added. The field name can be specified, and methods allow writing strings and real numbers. See the New Methods list below.
• The linear (plate carre', CAR) projection has been added for use with TDI (drift scan) images.
• Two new centroiding algorithms have been added: box & moment and Gaussian PSF fitting. These may be used by changing the Plate.CentroidAlgorithm property. Please read the cautions on the doc page for this property!
• It is now possible to use Emmanuel Bertin's SExtractor as an alternative to PinPoint's internal object detector. The XY positions from SExtractor are used by PinPoint for all other functions. Usage is transparent, and a new port of SExtractor 2.2.2 (by DC-3 Dreams) is inncluded along with config files as needed. Set the new Plate.UseSExtractor property to True in order to switch to this mode. Operation is transparent. See the doc page on Plate.UseSExtractor for info on config files, etc.
• A FITS file with missing BZERO can now be attached. The value is assumed to be 32768 (common usage for 16 bit unsigned data).
• The PlateStar.MakeMPC() method has a new optional parameter HighPrecision. If set True, the time and astrometric positions are reported to an extra decimal digit of accuracy by filling the space to the right of these fields with the extra digit. This should be used only if you are certain that you have this level of accuracy.

New Properties

• Plate.Airmass
• PlateStar.BinningHoriz
• PlateStar.BinningVert
• Plate.CacheImageStars
• Plate.CCDTemperature
• Plate.CentroidAlgorithm
• Plate.Email
• Plate.Humidity
• Plate.ImageBackgroundMean
• Plate.ImageBackgroundSigma
• Plate.ImageStatisticalMode
• Plate.LocalBackgroundMean(x, y)
• Plate.LocalBackgroundSigma(x, y)
• Plate.MaxSolveStars
• Plate.Pressure
• Plate.SiderealTime
• Plate.SiteElevation
• Plate.SiteLatitude
• Plate.SiteLongitude
• Plate.Solved
• PlateStar.Saturated

New Methods

• AttachNoImage()
• WriteFITSDouble()
• WriteFITSString()

What Has Changed in 4.0?

• The aperture centroiding algorithm has been improved, reducing random astrometric noise by a factor of two or more.
• Plate solutions with low numbers of stars are now significantly more reliable. V3 was too conservative in its prevention of false detections. By using some smarter logic, low-count plate solutions are more easily accomplished without significant increase in false solutions.
• Support for the newer matrix form of WCS has been added. If the plate has this form of WCS, it will be converted to scale/roll values. Any skew implied by the matrix is averaged out. Plate.UpdateFits() will write out both forms for maximum compatibility.
• The engine will now attach some 32-bit floating point images.
• Auto-aperture size selection has been improved to improve signal-to-noise without sacrificing accuracy.
• The default fopr Plate.MaxMatchResidual has been increased to 1 pixel.
• Magnitude fitting has been improved for faint objects.
• Manual aperture size limits have been changed to enforce on units of pixels instead of arc seconds. This allows images that are very very oversampled to be handled without exceeding the aperture size sanity limits.
• The problem of occasional magnitudes that are way way off has been fixed.
• The solver now uses a maximum order of 4 when set for automatic order selection. It is possible to allow it to use higher orders by changing Plate.FitOrder.
• The automatic selection of Plate.MaxMatchResidual has been changed to prevent impossibly tight tolerances on very oversampled images. It is now limited to one arc second minimum.
• The Plate.ExposureStartTime would sometimes be converted and written back with a 1 second increase. This has been fixed.
• The deprecated Plate.Transverse and Plate.ParabolicFitting properties have been removed (they were actually stubbed out and now return automation exceptions; the VTABLE is compatible with previous releases). The new Plate.CentroidAlgorithm property allows selection of centroid methods.
• It is now possible to set the Plate.ImageArray property from a VBScript program. Previous releases of PinPoint weren't able to handle the fact that VBScript passed a reference to the array rather than the array itself.
• Centroiding accuracy is no longer affected by large changes in average background level. This was a subtle problem that went unnoticed for several years.
• The object browser (type library) help strings now have FITS keyword information for those properties that map to FITS header fields.
• The old DATE, TIME-OBS, and UT FITS header fields are now always written out by the engine. The previous old-format detection logic was not 100% reliable, and left old data in those fields in unusual circumstances.
• Visual PinPoint's Discovery Asterisk feature has been fixed.
• Visual PinPoint's High Precision reporting has been fixed.

What's New in 3.0?

• New image-catalog star matching algorithm finds matches much faster, particularly on star-rich images.
• TDI (drift-scan) image support does observation time correction for detected objects.
• Singular-value decomposition solver for high-order fitting & extension to 7th order fit -- provides optical distortion correction across the entire field of view, even for 'severe" distortion.
• XY optical distortion transform coefficients are now saved in the FITS header, making it possible to re-apply distortion correction to images attached and processed at a later time. This is vital for images with significant distortion.
• New Plate properties for easy access to OBJCTRA and OBJCTDEC in FITS header
• Support for the Tycho-2 reference catalog has been added
• Support for the USNO-A2.0 reference catalog has been added
• Automatic flip/mirror image detection during plate solving, no need to hand-set these factors
• New simplified interface to the Gaussian filter - simply specify FWHM in arc seconds
• Laplacian-of-Gaussian (LoG) image filtering can enhance star-shaped objects in galaxies - useful for supernova detection
• Direct access to PinPoint's synthetic aperture photometer for manual measurements on individual objects in the image
• Support for Johnson-Cousins I and U band magnitudes in PlateStar objects
• Plate object properties now remain valid after detaching image file.
• Blink tool now puts out MPC records as well as the previous RA/Dec info
• Visual PinPoint has substantial changes and improvements.

New Properties

• Plate.TargetRightAscension
• Plate.TargetDeclination
• Plate.TDIMode
• Plate.ColorBand
• Plate.ImageModified
• PlateStar.InfraredMagnitude
• PlateStar.Magnitude
• PlateStar.Matched
• PlateStar.UltravioletMagnitude

New Methods

• Plate.DeleteFITSKey()
• Plate.ConvolveGaussian()
• Plate.ConvolveLoG()
• Plate.MeasureFlux()

What has changed

• Pixel stack overflow should never happen again. The stack is much larger, and stack overflow simply stops accumulation of pixels into the object rather than a fatal error.
• Plate.SetGaussian() and Plate.Convolve() are replaced by simpler and easier to use Plate.ConvolveGaussian() and Plate.ConvolveLoG()
• Can handle much larger sets of image and catalog stars, in the thousands.
• Improved magnitude fitting, support for plate color band and matching with corresponding color band magnitude info from the reference catalog
• ACT and Tycho-2 catalog star XY positions are now corrected for proper motion
• Tycho-2 B and V magnitudes are now corrected to Johnson-Cousins system
• Tycho-2 catalog stars now have Plate.MagnitudeError (RMS B & V) and Plate.PositionErr values available
• Fixed boundary error for catalog star lookup when prime meridian crosses the vertical boundary of an image
• Magnitude "zero point" in the FITS header is now (correctly) scaled to 1 sec exposure, and uses the more common ZMAG keyword. Images solved by older versions of PinPoint, which contain the unnormalized ZEROPT value will be corrected if attached and re-saved (UpdateFITS) using PinPoint V3.
• Several file handle leaks have been fixed
• Automatic selection of MinMatchStars has been improved
• PlateStar.MakeMPC() now supports optional parameters for discovery asterisk and publishable note code to be included in the MPC report line.
• Catalog star table size increased to 16384
• New method for calculating WCS eliminates noise in RollAngle and other small errors
• Calculates R-magnitude estimate in Tycho-2 catalog
• Fix crash when calling Plate.Solve() without first calling Plate.FindImageStars()
• Fix crash calling UpdateFITS() on images produced by old versions of CCDSoft which contain non-Y2K compliant DATE-OBS fields.
• Fix crash when calling Plate.Solve() "many" times after a single call to Plate.FindImageStars()
• Fix convolution methods to mark the image as modified after filtering
• ImageStars collection is deleted if any of the filtering methods are called
• CatalogStars collection is deleted if any of the WCS values are modified via changing properties after plate solving.
• Centroiding roundoff error corrected. This showed up on "large" plates towards high X and Y locations.

What's New in 2.0?

• Higher-order plate solution fitting, up to 5th order
• Automatic aperture sizing (this greatly improves close object resolution)
• Support for all 8 projection geometries used in the professional AIPS package
• Creating empty PlateStars collections and adding existing PlateStar objects to it
• Astrometric and photometric support for Digital Sky Survey (DSS) plates (read-only)
• Creating new FITS files from a Plate object (e.g., after setting the image array, see below)
• Direct read/write access to individual pixels in the image
• Read/write access to the entire image array
• The integral pixel width and height of each star ("full" width)
• Sorting ImageStars collections by X and Y coordinate
• Simple image blur
• Gaussian convolution for image cleanup
• Recognition of UT keyword, treated same as TIME-OBS.
• Writeable PlateStar magnitude properties, for use in photometric applications.

New Classes

• PlateDIB

New Properties

• Plate.MaxSolveTime
• Plate.FitOrder
• Plate.ImageArray
• Plate.ImagePixel
• Plate.MatchFitOrder
• Plate.ProjectionType
• PlateStar.Area
• PlateStar.Height
• PlateStar.Width

New Methods

• Plate.Blur()
• Plate.Convolve() (removed in 3.0)
• Plate.NewPlateDIB
• Plate.NewPlateStars()
• Plate.SetGaussian() (removed in 3.0)
• Plate.WriteFITS()
• PlateStars.Add()

What has changed?

• Image scanning is much faster, resulting in substantially shortened plate solve times
• Plate solving will first try to use existing WCS info as a solution, bypassing the time-consuming search process.
• The default Plate.MinimumStarSize changed from 4 to 3
• The default Plate.Catalog changed from GSC to GSC-ACT
• The default Plate.SigmaAboveMean changed from 3.0 to 4.0
• The default Plate InnerAperture changed from 12 to 0 (automatic)
• The default Plate.OuterAperture changed from 36 to 0 (automatic)
• Fix USNO SA2.0 catalog support for stars near celestial equator
• Fix transforms for images with RA=0 to prevent RA > 24.
• Many other minor fixes to internal logic