How to automatically generate several light curves?

LMN
Affiliation
Svensk Amator Astronomisk Förening, variabelsektionen (Sweden) (SAAF)
Fri, 09/04/2020 - 06:11

Hi!

I belive it is easies to decribe what I want rather than pose a question: 

I want to monitor about 20 stars in an easy way. My idea is to create a sort of "dashboard" where I can have lightcurves for them, automatically updated when the page refreshes. 

So I am imagining that what I'd need is a link that retrievs a particular lightcurve from the LightCurve generator without the need for me to manually enter any data. And I can have one such link per star. 

And then I create a web page where these lightcurves are embedded. 

Is there a way to do this? Any ressources I can look at? Creating web pages and handling html-code is not a problem for me, just finding the way to retrieve the data and curve from the LightCurve generator. 

Magnus

David__Benn
Affiliation
Astronomical Society of South Australia (ASSAU)
How to automatically generate several light curves?

Hi Magnus

It may be possible via a REST web service but you can do this by scripting VStar. For example, assuming the following is in a file called aid_load_LC_save.js:

root = "/Users/david/tmp/"

objs = ["RS Oph", "T Pyx"]

fromJDs = [2454852, 2454852]

toJDs = [2455852, 2455852]

for (i=0;i<objs.length;i++) {

vstar.loadFromAID(objs[i], fromJDs[i], toJDs[i])

vstar.lightCurveMode()

path = root + objs[i].replace(" ", "_") + ".png"

vstar.saveLightCurve(path, 600, 400)

}

exit()

you could run the following command from a Linux/Mac shell:

./VStar.sh --script aid_load_LC_save.js

The VStar window will open, run the script, then exit. In this case, two files would be saved:

  • /Users/david/tmp/RS_Oph.png
  • /Users/david/tmp/T_Pyx.png

For Windows, VStar.bat could be used.

VStar's scripting API also allows phase plots, period analysis and other operations to be carried out programmatically. See also the user manual.

David