Work on this program is motivated by author's personal interest in
asteroid and comet observations. First public release of
fitsblink
was introduced to TASS group
(http://www.tass-survey.org)
in November 1996 as a simple tool for FITS image display and blinking.
Later, functionality of the program was tuned to the needs of the comet
and asteroid observation program (PIKA), which is ongoing at the
Crni Vrh Observatory in Slovenia
(http://astro.ago.uni-lj.si/comets).
Fitsblink
attempts to be rather user friendly and
intuitive. Unfortunately, you still need to know what you are doing.
In particular, you should know what astrometry is and have some sense
to detect wrong results, which may appear due to a bad choice of
parameters used for star detection and star matching.
Fitsblink
may be freely distributed and used. You are not
allowed to sell it or to distribute changed program under the same
name. You can make your own version, but give it a different name. If
you use large parts of the source in some other program, a proper
credit should be given in the source file.
I always welcome comments, suggestions and bug reports concerning
fitsblink
. Note that I do not work on this program
professionally so the activity is limited to times when the pressure
from my job decreases a little. I will certainly try to fix any
serious bugs that may affect the intended functionality of the program
as soon as possible. As for suggestions for extended functionality, I
will consider them for the next burst of activity if they fit into my
concept of the program.
I would like to thank Bojan Dintinjana from the Astronomical-Geophysical Observatory Golovec (AGO) for his nice color palette and helpful suggestions and Herman Mikuz (AGO and Crni Vrh Observatory) for the example images.