brightest

Processing and analysis tool for astronomical imaging. The name refers to brightness estimation, which is one of the main tasks of the tool.

This tool was developed as part of my project on stellar statistics for the laboratory course Astronomy and Astrophysics in the winter semester 2024/25 at the RWTH Aachen University.

Supervisors: Mia Do, M.Sc.; Prof. Dr. Chr. Wiebusch; Prof. Dr. O. Pooth

Installation

To load raw images, the tool requires the rawkit library, which itself requires libraw (version 16, 17 or 18). I could not get the installation to work on Windows, so I will only provide instructions for Linux.

Install all OpenCV dependencies with:

sudo apt-get install python3-opencv

Libraw

Follow the instructions on the libraw website or run these commands:

wget https://www.libraw.org/data/LibRaw-0.18.13.tar.gz
tar xzvf LibRaw-0.18.13.tar.gz
cd LibRaw-0.18.13/
./configure
make
sudo make install
cd ..
rm -r LibRaw-0.18.13/
rm LibRaw-0.18.13.tar.gz

If rawkit cannot find the right version of libraw, make sure to uninstall other versions, e.g. with sudo apt remove libraw20.

Python dependencies

I use uv as a package manager. To install the dependencies, run:

uv venv

Otherwise, you can install the dependencies listed in pyproject.toml manually.