This is a backend interface for Hevelius, an astronomy processing software and observatory management system. It's in the early stages of development, but some of the features are usable already.
Status as of Sep 2025:
- Scan FITS repository on disk: Hevelius is able to scan a local disk for FITS files, extract some data from found files (from filenames and FITS header) and put this information into PostgreSQL DB. Then the DB is used to report various characteristics.
- Full sky histogram: Generate full sky distribution of found frames with 1 degree resolution. The data is presented as interactive RA/DEC chart.
- Points of interest: Generate a list of the most commonly photographed coordinates in the sky.
- Objects and frames search: Ability to find catalog objects and frames based on specified RA/DEC coordinates and radius.
- 4 Catalogs: Provides 4 catalogs (NGC, IC, Messier, and Caldwell) in a DB format and a basic interface to query it.
- PixInsight integration: This is in the very early stages. The idea is that Hevelius will be able to offload certain tasks to Pix or at least export/import data in a format that's compatible with PixInsight.
- Command line iterface: Currently Hevelius has a command line interface written in
python. - Web interface.
- Rest API.
- Ability to search based on distance. Implemented proper Haversine formula.
- Database management: Schema versioning and upgrades, backup, etc.
- Configuration: Config file support and some limited environment variables.
- Log in users
- List tasks (with pagination, filtering, and sorting)
- Add new observation task
- Edit existing observation task
- List objects from catalogs (Messier, Caldwell, NGC, IC are supported)
- Search objects in catalogs
- Display heat map of the sky (sky map colored with number of photos taken in each square degree)
- Installation - You probably want to start here.
- Commands reference - Available commands are (or soon will) be documented here.
- Catalogs - Hevelius comes with several astronomical catalogs.
- Database details - The most useful section is probably the paragraph about DB initalization.