Foucault Test Image Analyzer

0. Introduction
1. Download
2. Installation
3. Documentation
4. Acknowledgements

0. Introduction

Welcome to the homepage of Foucault Test Image Analyzer. If you are an amateur telescope maker, this software can take the tedium out of measuring the shape of your mirror.

Traditionally, amateur mirror makers use a Couder screen, nimble fingers and keen eyesight to quantify the results of the Foucault test by finding the exact knife locations where a zone is equally illuminated on the opposite sides of a mirror.

In this day and age, however, sophisticated illumination detectors (i.e. digital cameras) are inexpensive and readily available, thus eliminating the dependence on a highly subjective illumination comparison with the naked eye. This program, furthermore, eliminates the need for accurate knife position measurement. Simply take a sequence of photos at pre-set knife offsets, which need not be known with great accuracy, and let the software reduce the measurements and fit the theoretical illumination curves to best match the data.

These screenshots will give you an idea what measurement results look like.

1. Download

The latest release of the software is version 1.2. Here is the description of all the files in this release:

`foucault-1.2-win-jre.exe`	Self-extracting Windows executable containing the program and everything needed to run it. Get this package unless you understand Java.
`foucault-1.2.jar`	Just the program and supporting classes. You'll need Java to extract and run it. Get this package if you're using anything other than Windows.
`foucault-example.zip`	A set of sample images of a not-so-good measurement, and some test images. Illustrates the points discussed in the documentation.

If you're interested in developing the software further, you can also visit the project page at sourceforge.net: http://sourceforge.net/projects/foucault/. There you can browse or download the sources, file bugs, etc.

2. Installation

Windows users:
Download and run foucault-1.2-win-jre.exe to start the installation. Select location to install to when prompted. When the installation completes start the software from the Windows Start menu.
Everyone else:
To run the software, you'll need Java 1.3 or later. Get the bundle for your platform from http://java.sun.com. Make sure you download the full SDK, not just the JRE. After you install Java, you should be able to run the "jar" utility from the command line. Unpack foucault-1.2.jar by typing:
```
jar xf foucault-1.2.jar
```
This will create a directory foucault-1.2 containing the script foucault.sh. Run this script to start the program.

3. Documentation

Instructions for using the program are available here.

4. Acknowledgments

This software uses optimization routines translated from Fortran by Steve Verrill <steve (at) ws13.fpl.fs.fed.us>, see this project. Thanks Steve.

All the graphics is done using the Scientific Graphics Toolkit from NOAA. Thanks Donald.

Project hosting generously provided by

Maintained by Dejan Vucinic <dvucinic (at) users.sourceforge.net>
Last updated on May 14th, 2007.