Is anyone, anyone at all, using any software tools that will perform point-spread-function (psf) fitting photometry?
A good number of stars I have observed over the last few years have faint companions, especially in the galactic plane region. The photometry could be improved by removing the blended companion.
Back in the day, decades ago DAOphot was the thing. Today there seems to be nothing available. Aperture Photometry Tool might be able to do it… building the psf kernal, sometimes called the point-response-function (prf) is the hardest part.
I believe siril does a psf fit, as well as aperture photometry. I tried comparing both approaches on some gmcep measures I did, but did not see appreciable differences. I stuck with aperture since the psf required setting an area of interest rather than point and click ( although the aoi seemed arbitrary it worked well and the documentation claimed it better). You can check siril documentation to verify.
DAOphot is still around but unix/linux - yes even solaris! I don’t run any computers that use linux anymore and too old to start again.
Source code is available for DAOPhot for those with a good fortran compiler. I have a decent 32-bit fortran compiler but I know there will be strange dependencies that will cause great frustration to myself so that is out.
Pixinsight might be able to do it but the tools seem to be optimized for generating deconvolution kernals to make more pretty pictures.
I own Pixinsight but the interface is very poor IMHO and after a few steps in is incomprehesible. Siril also has a new-fangled interface that one may get lost in quickly.
Python is a snake isn’t it?
I know Aperture Photometry Tool will do the psf photometry but then I’m left with how do I generate the psf kernal. So I’m down to is there a tool that can pass over an image, generate an average psf kernal of say 25 pixels in size and can then allow the psf kernal to be saved as a fits? APT can then be used to import the kernal and do the fitting and photometry.
Anyone in the AAVSO able to build a psf kernal piece of software that has a basic user interface for Windows 11 Pro? We can probably find in the literature a proper method to generate the average psf kernal.
I’d be your best friend most likely if someone would write the software to generate the psf kernal.
I’ll take a look at siril again but time is a wasting at my age…
I get the “age-time wasting” thing completely! LOL, but have given up on my " the runway is getting too short for this" excuse, given it seems one has to take five sidetracks to get to where you want to be nowadays. We can do a google meet or other, and I can show the psf/photometry in siril on your data, if your other avenues fail and you desire.
Thanks but I am currently trying, evaluating another piece-of-software. Not sure at this point if it is worth the effort. Aperture photometry does 99% of what I need but there is always at least blended variable that might benefit from that extra effort. Thanks to all, and to all a good night… gonna be cold and windy here! Yoo Hoo!
The PSF Photometry program I have been working on has been updated so that one can install it easily using a setup.exe. From the release notes:
Welcome to MAOPhot 1.1.0, a PSF Photometry tool using Astropy 6.1.6 and Photutils 2.0.2 (Presently this has only been tested on Windows 10 and Windows 11).
Important Update: Install MAOPhot by downloading MAOPhot_SETUP.exe and executing. There is no longer a need to download Visual C++ libraries. (This has only been tested on Windows 10 and Windows 11.)
New Feature: “Selected Stars” The list of peaks for generating the effective PSF Model can be examined more closely. The list can be edited.
