Roadmap

The plan, in the order it is being built. The overall scope and every decision so far are kept in the project's private issue tracker. Nothing below is available until its issue is closed and this page says so; dates are deliberately not given.

V1-foundation (built)

1. Workspace, continuous integration, licensing checks and documentation.
2. Core engine on the CPU: FITS input and output, calibration, star detection, registration, and stacking with outlier rejection and weighting.
3. The valerian command line (calibrate, register, stack, info) and a minimal desktop shell with the About page.

After the foundation

Deconvolution. GPU kernels for calibration, the registration warp and the stack combiner (--backend gpu, valerian bench) are done, and pay off for a stack that keeps its frames on the device. Drizzle (valerian drizzle: variable-pixel linear reconstruction of dithered frames, mosaics dropped without interpolation) is done on the CPU. Plate solving (valerian solve: a TAN or TAN-SIP WCS against a bundled Gaia catalogue, hinted or blind) and stretching (valerian stretch: midtone, arcsinh and generalised hyperbolic curves, with a live preview in the desktop app) and background extraction (valerian background: polynomial and thin-plate spline surfaces) and photometric colour calibration (valerian photocal: white balance fitted against Gaia BP-RP colours) are done on the CPU; hand-placed background samples wait for the background tool in the window. The desktop app has the approved design: a workflow rail of five steps (calibrate, register, stack, process, export), notices, an image view with zoom, pan and a histogram, and a night-vision palette, with every tool above in its panels. Background extraction and mosaics are next.

Shared code with Helia

For now Valerian uses Helia's crates as pinned git dependencies. Moving the common code into a shared workspace is planned.