Astronomy and Coffee

More on catalogue organizing for the clusters.

The "fun" for the day was making FIMS 2.52 for MacOSX. I have got yesterday version 2.43, which is no longer accepted by ESO to prepare masks with it. New period, new version :-)

First thing was to find out the difference between the Mac and the Linux version for 2.43. Turned out to be much simpler than I thought (of course, simpler when it's done and you're only seeing what was changed, figuring out what to change is a whole other story and I'm thankful to Marco Lombardi and whoever else did this part). The modifications are all related to the standalone version of Skycat that comes with FIMS.

Basically, instead of having a pre-compiled skycat 2.7.3 for linux a Mac version of skycat 3.0 was included. Then is basically changing the version number (some places have it hardwired, some ask the system for it and they were bypassed and hardwired) and changing the "instalation" of skycat, instead of copying a file and making it executable, the whole Skycat.app directory is copied. The copy must be done with options -RL, so that the skycat link inside Skycat.app/Content/MacOS/ gets properly copied, as a link, and not that the file is copied replacing the link. If the file is copied, skycat doesn't run, because paths will become a problem.

Anyway, is a hand full of modifications, and it works. At least it seems to. Did some tests with masks and couldn't find any important difference. It should not have any, since the modifications are only to make skycat install and run, not at the FIMS plugin. Of course it requires the remark "comes as it is, use at your own risk"!!! :-))

In any case it is possible to have a MacOS version of FIMS .If I ever find out how maintains it, I'll give them the information, so that they can do a MacOS version of it.

Also some coding on the KG project.