[Aavso-photometry] Announcement: New photometry features in Mira software

[Michael Newberry]

This message describes an update to the Mira software. This post was approved by Arne.

The new features described below were lifted from the development of Mira version 8. Since they are important to users now, whereas Mira 8 will not be released for a few months, we have made them available in version 7. This is a free upgrade.

Currently, we are working on the substantial additions to the Mira documentation. The updates should be available for download by the first of next week.

Michael Newberry

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In all Mira platforms:

-- Am improved light curve plotter handles any number of targets, standards, and/or check stars, and includes error bars.
-- AAVSO "Extended Format" report generator for use with a single standard or for ensemble photometry, for a single image or a stack of images. A sample report has been cleared by HQ.
-- Enhancements to ensemble photometry, standard weighting, reporting, and  calculation of magnitude errors.
-- Enhancements for using standard stars when importing and processing objects from target lists (Note: catalog importing is not available in Mira AL).

In Mira Pro only:

-- A new Star Removal tool uses 1 or more stars to generate a PSF template for an image and then use it the template to remove one or more target stars in the image. With a stack of images, the PSF template can be automatically created and applied to the same objects through the stack.
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