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January 22, 2019
A significant update for 64-bit Mira
Pro x64, Mira AL x64, and
Mira Pro is available. Below are some highlights for version 8.033:
- The Image Toolbar has been converted to an
Image Bar, now a docking pane. This is a great asset to functionality
as well as use of screen space. Mira Pro x64 also allows you to
switch to the legacy Image Toolbar using a checkbox in the General
Properties dialog.
- Improved alignment of functionality and
documentation between Mira AL x64 and Mira
Pro x64 for consistency
between researcher/educator and student use.
- Dynamic Horizontal and Vertical Slice Plots
connected to the image cursor position and movement, displayed in
docking panes (Mira
Pro x64). A brief presentation on these and related features is
available in
Live Pixel Analysis.
- Interactive Align Horizontal and
Align Vertical commands for quickly orienting images such as spectra
to horizontal or vertical (Mira
Pro x64).
- Go To Measurement
commands are added to all reports that list measurements of image
objects, making it easy to identify the source and its exact exact
location in different images, images sets, and windows.
- New Docking Panes Toolbar has buttons
that toggle between "show" and "hide" for all Image Window docking
panes.
- New Crop by Rectangle command for quick
interactive cropping of images and images sets. This adds to the two
existing precision commands, Crop at Cursor and Crop
Image.
- More Image Window Keystroke Commands to quickly zoom, plot, and measure
images according to the Image Cursor position and size.
- Moffat Point Spread Function option added to the
Create Synthetic Image and Radial Profile
fit commands.
This supplements the existing Gaussian PSF option.
- Added new statistical methods
and normalization methods used in combining images, computing region statistics,
and image calibration (Mira AL x64).
- The Find Object command creates a photometry
object list for an image by identifying point sources while rejecting small artefacts like cosmic ray hits.
This works the same as manually marking objects. Use this to create monitored object lists, create an H-R diagram, etc.
- Other minor features including Hint Windows
for interactive commands, additional options, and more, plus some bug fixes.
August 16, 2018
Version 8.029 released for the new 64-bit
Mira AL x64. New features:
- 64-bit native application utilizes the expanded
memory space and speed of 64-bit architecture.
- Improved and enhanced Express Calibration tool, a version of that provided in Mira Pro x64.
- New chart package for creating presentation graphics (in
addition to the standard Plotting package).
- New commands to create, edit, and apply pixel masks to
repair bad pixels.
- New commands to create, edit, and and apply blemish
masks to repair small regions as well as partial or full bad columns, rows,
and isolated pixels.
- New command to modify keywords (add, change value, and
rename) in image headers.
- Command for rotational gradient filter for enhancing
images of extended sources such as comets.
- Command for Custom Filter kernel of any dimension, in
addition to existing command for simple 3x3 kernel.
- New command to set independent linear axis scales, used
for data such as radio astronomy maps, etc.
- New command to assign unit names to the image axes, such
as km, mm, or any other.
- New command for plotting histograms.
- New command for plotting a radial profile, including
accurate calculation of the FHWM for point sources.
- New command for specifying the type of region statistics
to be measured (useful, for example, to compare alpha-clipped mean and
standard deviation with those using the ordinary mean, median, or other
estimators).
- New single-keystroke commands work with the image cursor
to make measurements and plots (shortcuts).
- New commands for changing the displayed X and Y axis
coordinate precision for live readout.
July 23, 2018
Version 8.029 released for Mira Pro x64. This
includes 5 bug fixes:
-
Interactive Contour crash bug: Under certain
circumstances, the command would lag, then crash Mira. When using
this tool, remember that the contour computation limits its range to
inside the Image Cursor rectangle.
-
Modify Keywords command: Profiles were not being
saved to the correct folder.
-
Script Manager: The command was searching for
scripts in an obsolete folder.
-
Table “Save As” command: When saving table data
to a file, the initial file name is taken from the table title. When
the table title contained an invalid file name character (e.g.,
“?:\*”), the “Save As” command exited without doing anything. Now,
the initial file name replaces invalid characters with an underscore
(“_”). Of course, the initial name can be changed in the “Save As”
dialog.
-
MExtract Module: In the Photometry
post-processing module, some of zero point options were not
correctly applied to the magnitude calculations.
June 20, 2018
Version 8.028 released for Mira Pro x64.
May 18, 2018
For technical readers who simply must know: Here are
the results of our annual code analysis. Mira Pro x64 contains 1.8
million lines of source code authored in-house, plus much more from
licensed code libraries. The average code line length is 28 bytes.
May 15, 2018
Version 8.026 released for Mira Pro x64.
-
Added Open in Excel command to
measurement table menus. This copies the table contents directly to
Microsoft Excel rather than saving the table to a CSV file and
separately opening the file in Excel.
-
Added a Cosmic Ray Filter to
Cosmetic Corrections in the Express Calibration procedure. This filter remains
available separately in the Processing > Filters menu.
-
The local program help and on-line Web help were
greatly expanded.
January 24, 2018
Version 8.023 released for Mira Pro x64.
-
The new Adaptive Estimator photometric background estimation method
was implemented (see the January 16, 2018 announcement). This and
other background estimators are selected on the Other Properties page of the
Aperture Photometry Properties dialog.
-
Added Statistics measurements for data in Plot
Windows. Use the command in the Measure menu or the 's' keystroke
with the plot window being top-most. Statistics are chosen using the
Statistics Properties dialog. More than a dozen estimators are available.
January 16, 2018
New, robust photometric background estimation method
for Mira Pro x64.
-
A new Adaptive Estimator option for Mira Pro x64 solves a vexing
problem in aperture photometry for estimating the background level when stars and artifacts (e.g.,
cosmic ray events) contaminate the background ring around
the source. This new estimator can return an
accurate background estimate even when the background sample
contains artifacts significantly brighter than the target object.
One development goal for this estimator was to return an empirical
error, determined from the contaminated background sample in the
image data, approaching the theoretical error calculated from
internal sources (photon shot noise, readout noise, pixel response
non-uniformity, and digitization noise). This target was achieved
and the empirical error calculated from a contaminated background
sample now approaches a Gaussian Normal noise distribution with skewness near 0. This new estimator adds to
previous options including the mean, median, and mode.
January 8, 2018
Version 8.022 released for all 64-bit Mira platforms.
-
New Statistics Properties dialog for choosing
advanced statistics to be interactively measured using the image
cursor for one image or the image set.
-
New keystroke commands for Image Windows work
with the image cursor as accelerators for menu and toolbar commands
that measure a single image or image set:
a (align image set on centroid
position), c (centroid
coordinates), f (FWHM), h (horizontal plot),
i (pixel value
histogram), p (pixel value table), r
(radial profile plot), s (statistics; see
"Statistics Properties" item
above), v (vertical plot). These supplement
longstanding set of image window keystrokes, the arrow keys for
moving the image cursor and Tab/Alt+Tab for stepping forward or
backward through an image set.
-
Additional, detailed processing messages logged by the image
calibration pipeline functions.
-
New "Set Output Pixel Type" method added to the
Express Image Calibration pipeline.
-
Fixes to a few minor bugs.
Changes from version 8.022 back through version 8.003 are listed in the README document included in the installation.
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December 22, 2017
Major update version 8.020 released for the
64-bit platforms
Mira Pro x64 and
Mira Pro.
This significant update includes many improvements and new
features, as shown in this
Mira Pro
x64 Screenshot. Here are a few:
-
Enhancements to the 6 pipelined image calibration commands,
including Create Master Bias, Create Master Dark, Create Master
Flat, Create Illumination Flat, Create Pixel Flat, and Express
Image Calibration. The master correction creation tools and Express
Calibration include options for 3 different bias methods and several
sub methods, 3 dark methods, 3 flat field types, 3 cosmetic
corrections, filtered flat libraries, and application of multiple
illumination flats.
-
New Chart module for
presentation graphics: The new chart window type takes data from measurements and other
tabulated data in table and view windows and panes. Charts may also be printed and copied as a
bitmap to the Windows clipboard for insertion into other documents.
Initially supported features include a variety of plot marker types
and properties, data grouping, legends, etc. The separate Plot
Window functionality continues to be available.
-
New Create Image Keyword List command: This new
tool
generates a table of images and values of their specified keywords. From the data
table, image sets may be created and column data may be plotted for
analytical purposes.
-
Speed improvements of tabulating photometry
measurements for large data sets.
-
Fixes to numerous small bugs present in minor
versions prior to this major release.
Changes from version 8.020 back through version 8.003 are listed in the README document included in the installation.
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