I can provide my VS pipeline to anyone who may find it interesting and/or useful. The stages run as follows, where the bolded terms are my scripts, most of them in Perl, one in bash:
- Download a CCD photometry HTML file from AAVSO’s VSP page, then run it through CCD2APT which produces two files, one a source list for APT and the other a comparisons list for APT2VSS (described below). This needs be done only once per variable.
- (Optional but recommended) Check the images for plausibility — correct field, not trailed, no inconvenient satellite tracks, etc. I use the ds9 viewer.
- Put a WCS on the FITS files with solve-field from a local installation of astrometry.net. For efficiency reasons I store a pre-parameterized call to solve-field held in a trivial shell-script. That for SV Ari reads:
solve-field -O -p -L 0.25 -H 1.5 -u app -8 pos -3 03:25:03.34 -4 +19:49:52.9 -5 2.0 -z 4 *.fit
- Remove all the extraneous crud that solve-field leaves behind with clean_solve.
- Co-add if desired, using SWarp with COMBINE-T = AVERAGE
- Use APT for aperture photometry, either interactively or scripted. APT is very easy to script.
- APT2VSS converts APT’s CVS-format output into a TSV file ready for submission directly to the BAA-VSS database.
- (Optional, every so often) Accumulate all the individual TSV files for a given variable with merge_phottsv into a multi-record file suitable for BAA-VSS submission.
- (Optional, once a month) Run all the BAA-VSS files created in a given month through VSS2TA to produce a file in the format which The Astronomer prefers.
Scripting the core of the pipeline is itself trivial.