[AstroPy] [Ann] PyGuide

[Russell E Owen]

Announcing PyGuide, a package to support guiding.

PyGuide uses python, numarray and some custom C extensions to find 
stars, centroid and fit star shapes (not including ellipticity).

The algorithms were developed by Jim Gunn and were originally 
designed for guiding on images sent through a coherent fiber bundle. 
Thus they work well even if bits of the image are missing, so long as 
you have a proper mask. In fact our tests show that this code can 
handle guiding on a slitviewer, where the object is mostly down the 
slit (so long as you pay attention to the predicted centroid error 
and don't try to overcorrect when the error is large).

Jim Gunn's original C code has been guiding the SDSS for something 
like a year now, with great success. We have been using PyGuide for 
several months to guide our 3.5m telescope with an offset guider 
(again, quite successfully). We expect to start guiding on an Echelle 
slitviewer within a few months.

The code is released under the Gnu GPL license.

-- Russell
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