The fitsblink program will in principle run on a PC 486, 8 MB
of RAM, 1024x768 pixel graphics card and 15'' color monitor. It will
be rather slow, however, and the amount of images loaded at one time
will be limited. The recommended minimal configuration is Pentium 200
MHz, 32 MB RAM, 1280x1024 video card and 17'' monitor or better.
Other platforms: any equivalently powerful Unix workstations should be
good enough. However, it is up to you to obtain appropriate libraries
and compile the program. Fitsblink uses cfitsio 2.025,
xforms 0.88 and clapack libraries. Please do not attempt
to use any earlier version of the libraries because the program will
most probably not work with them.
Fitsblink is also works under the OS/2 + XFREE86 operating
system thanks to Duncan Munro from Canada.
Version 2.11 of fitsblink was successfully compiled on SUNOS
4.3 but some modifications of the makefile and commenting out
some #include statements were necessary. Unfortunately,
binaries are not available on the fitsblink home page.
To do astrometry, you also need CD-ROMs with GSC 1.1 star catalog
and/or USNO SA 1.0 catalog. In principle you can also have exact
copies of these catalogs on hard disk, if you wish to avoid mounting
and unmounting of CD-ROM drives and your hard disk is big enough. It
is advisable to copy both Norh and South GSC to hard disk and the
compress the files using gzip. This will save a lot of space and is
automatically supported because of the cfitsio library. The
ACT (Tycho + proper motions) catalog is also supported, however you
will need to obtain the catalog and then make a shortened binary
version used by fitsblink. The URL where you can get ACT, is
http://aries.usno.navy.mil/ad/act/act.html.
You can get the compiled program for the Linux system on
www.fitsblink.net.
Sources of fitsblink are available at
http://www.fitsblink.net. You can find
the latest version of the cfitsio library at
ftp://legacy.gsfc.nasa.gov/software/fitsio/c/
and the xforms 0.88 library at
http://bragg.phys.uwm.edu/xforms.
The CLAPACK library can be obtained from
http://www.netlib.org/lapack. If you really want to compile \verbfitsblink=
by yourself, make sure that you install these libraries properly.
Then edit the makefile and enter proper paths for include files
and libraries. You also need to change C compiler switches if
you don't use GNU C. Then type make and hope for the best. If
you succeed in compiling fitsblink for some other platform and
you wish to share the binary code with other people, you are welcome
to send it to me and I will add it to the fitsblink home page.
The easiest way to install fitsblink is to get the binary
distribution which is conveniently packed in the RPM format. If your
Linux system supports RPM, than all you need to do is:
/usr/local/bin is in your path.
When you get a working binary by compiling a source code, you can
install it to a directory which is listed in your path, for example
/usr/local/bin. When you run fitsblink for the first
time, it will complain about not finding a parameter file. Just
proceed with the program and choose the Settings item in the
Astrometry menu. Write in your default settings and press
the Save button. A file which contains your settings is named
.fitsblinkrc and is written to your home directory. For those
less familiar with Unix, files starting with a dot are ``hidden'',
i.e. normally not shown by the ls command.
The HTML-ized version of the user manual (this one) serves also as the
help file. It is a good idea to put it to some known place, such as
/usr/local/lib/fitsblink.
You can install the fitsblink program (default location
/usr/local/bin) and user manual (default location
/usr/local/lib/fitsblink by typing make install. You
must be root for this.