FITSH - a software package for astronomical image processing - version 0.9.4
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This software package provides a set of independent binary programs 
(tasks) that are designed for execution from a UNIX command line shell 
or shell script. Each of these tasks performs a specific operation (e.g. 
transforming an image to another reference frame, search and identifiy 
stars or other point-like sources, do photometry, transform/display a 
FITS image to a popular graphics format, ...) while the details of a 
certain operation are specified via command switches and arguments. 
Therefore this package does not need any higher level operating 
environment than a standard UNIX shell, however, processing the related 
data might require a little more knowledge of the used shell itself (the 
related documentation and examples found in this page use the bash 
shell). Additionally, some of the processing steps might require minor 
or basic operations performed with other tools like awk or text 
processing utilities (sort, uniq, paste, ...).

For a brief summary about the individual tasks, check the ``Tasks'' 
section of the web page of the project, namely at https://fitsh.net/task

Supported systems and requirements
----------------------------------

Actually, the program has been developed under GNU/Linux (Debian, i386 
and amd64), and it also tested and seems to work properly on Sun/SunOS, 
PC/NetBSD and Mac/OSX systems as well. Cross-compilation is also available
for Windows targets (32-bit and 64-bit systems) but with the lack
of support for dynamic extensions. 

However, please note that the primary development platform of the 
package is Debian GNU/Linux, thus compilation-time warnings might occur 
on other operating systems.

Documentation
-------------

The FITSH tasks have a built-in self-explaining reference documentation 
system, that can be asked using the --long-help option. The format of 
this long-help output is a standard to the `help2man` utility, with 
which nice manual pages can be generated easily (and then these can be 
converted to PDF or PostScript as well). See also the `make help2man` 
Makefile-target: this target builds the manual pages as well as converts 
them into PostScript format if the utilities `help2man` and `groff` are 
installed properly on the host operating system.

The web page of the project (https://fitsh.net/) also displays these 
manual pages as well as one can find further, completely working 
examples.

Copyright
---------

This software was written by Andras Pal <apal@szofi.net>.

The FITSH package is a free software, available under the terms of GPLv3 
(see ./COPYING for a full license).  This program is free software: you 
can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General 
Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either 
version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but 
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of 
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU 
General Public License for more details.

Bug reports, comments and ideas are welcomed, send these to Andras Pal 
<apal@szofi.net>. See also the web page of the project, found at 
https://fitsh.net/. That page gathers information about the program 
(including documentation and examples), this is the primary download 
source of the package itself, and additionally, serves a public forum 
for the program users in various topics.

Acknowledgements
-----------------

If you find the FITSH package useful in your research, please cite the paper 
2012MNRAS.421.1825P (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012MNRAS.421.1825P)
as "P\'al, A. 2012, MNRAS, 421, 1825".
