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I came across the video Tutorial: Creating a Lightcurve of a Minor Planet linked below by Tycho Tracker, which is software that builds an asteroid light curve from raw images and analyses it to obtain period, etc. Having noticed that this is only available on Windows, I'm wondering whether there is something similar for MacOS or Unix systems.

Does some open-source code exist to perform similar analysis in the small-body community, or does everyone has their own pipeline? If there were some python-based scripts to do similar work, I'd be grateful if someone could point me there.

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    $\begingroup$ Just a thought; if the raw images are from optical or infrared telescopes on Earth (and not for example radar images), then the asteroids will look the same as stars. So I think what the software does is determine the brightness of stars and uses nearby identified stars of known brightness as calibration? If so, there certainly should be several different tools out there to do that in Python for example. However it certainly looks like a very nice self-contained bit of software with a handy user interface and it is probably not easy to implement all of those in Python. $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Commented Jul 7, 2022 at 22:10
  • $\begingroup$ thanks for the comment. Indeed it ain't easy to have all the graphics in python, but I was wondering if folks knew about such a tool nevertheless, being able to output the desired results without the involvement of a non-graphical interface, at least. $\endgroup$
    – mysterium
    Commented Aug 10, 2022 at 14:51
  • $\begingroup$ I'm not sure what you mean, python is certainly typing lines of script, there's no GUI that I know of for Python, but it sounds like an interesting idea $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Commented Aug 10, 2022 at 14:55
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    $\begingroup$ apologies for any confusion. I was saying that it would be nice to be able to have at least the results without going through a graphical UI. As in the sense that you get the results shown in the video, by calling different python routines. Hope this is clearer. $\endgroup$
    – mysterium
    Commented Aug 10, 2022 at 15:22

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I am the developer of the software shown in the tutorial video. After seeing your post last year, I decided to create a version of it that runs natively on macOS. It took me nearly twelve months to do so, but it is now complete, and you can see the result here:

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    $\begingroup$ this is very impressive! A very pleasant surprise indeed. I didn't expect this post would end up giving you the idea to develop a MacOS version from scratch. Thank you very much, I'm sure a lot of people will benefit from that. I'll definitely check this out. $\endgroup$
    – mysterium
    Commented Sep 7, 2023 at 20:18

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