I have now made available the set of programs I use for processing photometry and producing plots and reports, the ‘PEST Pipeline‘.

I’ve included an overview, downloads as well as a tutorial.  The Pipeline is the result of several years of development, with the TESS project (in particular Karen Collins) driving requirements over the last year.  It’s quick and efficient in getting from raw photometric data to plots and reports, mainly because there little fiddling with settings and selections on windows, and lots of standardisation of everything from workflow to file location and naming.

I’d like to acknowledge David Motl and his fantastic C-Munipack package on which the Pipeline is dependent.  It’s seriously good in terms of speed and ability to crunch large datasets.  It processes observations with hundreds of images and measures thousands of stars on each without blinking, or running out of memory.   David has been very helpful when I’ve had some very detailed questions about error calculations and data file formats.

Acknowledgements also to John Kielkopf of the University of Louisville, Kentucky for the Gaia check section of the code.

There is a steep learning curve though, and you’d have to be comfortable with Linux.  Only works and tested on that OS, I’m afraid!