News

ATTENTION: The latest version of APT (v. 3.0.8) requires Java 1.8.0_333 or higher to run properly. Built the APT.jar file on a MacBook Pro laptop under macOS Big Sur, Version 11.6.8 using apache-ant-1.9.16 and JDK 1.8.0_333. The APT.jar file is platform-independent, of course, and can be run on any computer with available Java 1.8.0_333 or higher, such as Windows, Macs, Linux, etc.

October 7, 2022

Modified the code to write a file called psf.fits in the .AperturePhotometryTool hidden directory of the user’s home directory, containing the original PSF (before upsampling), but with negative values set to zero (if any).

Added Display PSF button to PSF Photometry panel, along with associated visualization functionality. Made refinements to the PSF Photometry panel.

September 30, 2022

Aperture Photometry Tool, v. 3.0.7, is now available:

Added a control to the PSF Photometry tool for rotating the computed PSF based on a 2-D Gaussian function with different sigmas along its major and minor axes (positive angle rotates counter-clockwise).

September 27, 2022

Aperture Photometry Tool, v. 3.0.6, is now available:

Added option to the PSF Photometry tool for generating the PSF using a 2-D Gaussian function with user-specified sigmaX and sigmaY, as an alternative to reading in the PSF from a FITS image file.

September 20, 2022

Aperture Photometry Tool, v. 3.0.5, is now available:

Modified the PSF Photometry panel to display an error status from the processing. Made other related refinements.

September 19, 2022

Aperture Photometry Tool, v. 3.0.4, is now available:

Added new section about the new tool for PSF Photometry to the “About & Help” documentation.

Added new Set Aperture Coordinates button to the PSF Photometry panel. Fixed code indentation and formatting irregularities in the PsfPhotometryFluxPanel class. Added handlers to input widgets to detect changes in inputs.

Set DEBUG=false in the PsfPhotometryFlux class and added dialog messages to indicate various conditions that lead to unreliable PSF photometry.

September 7, 2022

Aperture Photometry Tool, v. 3.0.3, is now available:

https://aperturephotometry.org/downloads/

Added new option for PSF photometry, under the Tools menu bar, which computes the flux (source intensity) by convolving the data with a user-supplied PSF (works independently of the aperture photometry on the main GUI panel). No centroiding is done for the PSF photometry, so the results are forced photometry at the user-specified source position. Thanks to Dr. Frank Masci for suggesting this functionality.

Modified the Simple Photometric Calibration Tool (under the Tools menu bar) so that the data plotting for the horizontal axis of the magnitude-differences vs. magnitude graph has calibrated magnitudes from the calibrated source list.

Modified the build.xml file to display a background image within the frame of the opened *.dmg file with a message that instructs the user to drag the Aperture Photometry Tool application to the Applications folder.

November 11, 2021

Aperture Photometry Tool, v. 3.0.2, is now available:

https://aperturephotometry.org/downloads/

Updated the built-in “About & Help” documentation with a brief description of the new interactive tool under the Tools menu bar called “Aperture Image-Data 3D Surface Chart”.

Augmented the aforementioned tool with the cubehelix color scale (in addition to the existing rainbow and custom color scales).

Added code to ImageJPanel class to catch the following exception: Exception in thread “AWT-EventQueue-0” java.lang.InternalError: Surface not cachable.

October 26, 2021

Aperture Photometry Tool, v. 3.0.1, is now available:

https://aperturephotometry.org/downloads/

Added a text field for specifying the star’s identifier (NAME column) to the panel for exporting the photometry data to an AAVSO submission file.

Created a new interactive tool under the Tools menu bar, called “Aperture Image-Data 3D Surface Chart”, that displays a 3D surface chart of the image data at the aperture location, where the surface is computed via bilinear interpolation. In the preferences (save preferences after running the new tool), the keyword apertureImageSurfaceChart3DGridAxisSamples controls the number of samples in the interpolation grid along each dimension, and the default value is 90. The 3D surface chart can be rotated interactively by dragging with the mouse to view the aperture image-data from any angle. Setting a higher number of interpolation-grid samples will make the rotation response slower. ALT-mouse-drag can be used to move the 3D surface chart within the display panel, and the mouse wheel zooms in and out.

October 14, 2021

Aperture Photometry Tool, v. 3.0.0, is now available:

https://aperturephotometry.org/downloads/

Completely revamped the bundling of the clickable app for the Mac so that there are no longer dependencies on JavaApplicationStub and no longer explicit dependencies on com.apple.eawt.* Java classes. The Mac clickable app utilizes Java option -Xmx2048m for the memory setting, and users with larger memory requirements will have to run APT from the command line with explicit java command (see listing of APT.csh for examples).

For build/delivery simplicity, the APT package will no longer be available in the compact-screen dmg file. Users who want this feature can simply set compactFlag=true in the default preferences file, which is APT.pref in the hidden directory .AperturePhotometryTool in the user’s home directory.

Added a new tool under the File menu for exporting the photometry data to an AAVSO submission file. Thanks to Phil Sullivan, member of the AAVSO and teacher of one of the AAVSO photometry courses, for suggesting this new functionality. The key parameters for this tool are explained below, which are required inputs and stored as keyword/value pairs in the preferences:

aavsoSubmitFile: AAVSO submission filename (CSV option only available at this time).
aavsoObserverCode: Observer code of the user as uniquely assigned by the AAVSO.
airmassColumnFitsKeyword: FITS-header keyword for airmass (e.g., AIRMASS).
obsdateColumnFitsKeyword: FITS-header keyword for observation start date/time (e.g., DATE-OBS or JD).
convertDateTimeIntoJulianDateFlag: Flag to be set for converting observation start date/time from ISO 8601 format into JD.
exptimeColumnFitsKeyword: FITS-header keyword for exposure time (e.g., EXPTIME), for computing the observation date/time midpoint.

Put a progress bar on the tool for exporting the photometry data to a CSV plain-text file, since it takes some time to complete for large photometry files with data rows obtained from many different input FITS images. Also, dramatically improved the runtime of this tool for the case where all photometry-data rows are from the same input FITS image. Fixed minor bugs in source-code files for the PhotometryDataToExcelPanel and CsvFileSettings classes.

Put a progress bar on the tool for exporting user-selected image data to a CSV plain-text file.

Added functionality to savePreferences function in the APT class that conveniently saves preferences-file keywords in lexical order.

Modified APT.csh to allow up to 12 arguments. E.g., this allows the following batch-mode command:

APT.csh -i myfile.fits -p APT.pref -s sourceListByAPT -o APT.out -b modelF.fits -v 1

Added diagnostic print statements to the ImageJPanel class.

September 20, 2020

The APT website has been updated with a new look, upgraded infrastructure, and vastly improved security. The content of the website is largely unchanged from before the remodeling. The new website runs the latest version of WordPress, which is compatible with different devices and screen sizes.

The new APT website is SSL-enabled (secured using an encrypted connection), and an SSL certificate has been properly installed!

The website support form is now working properly.