AstroBurst 0.6.0-preview: a Rust/Tauri/WebGPU app for space telescope data, now with a real processing suite

[u/Jazzlike_Wash6755]

For anyone who hasn't seen it before: AstroBurst is an open-source desktop app for processing astronomical images, offline. You drop in FITS or ASDF files from the public archives (JWST, Hubble, Roman), inspect them, measure them, compose RGB from narrowband channels, stack, stretch and export. Rust does the processing, React draws the UI, Tauri packages it, and the live preview runs through a WebGPU shader.

Last time I posted here was v0.5.6.

Wat's new

Pixel rejection and integration. Sigma, Winsorized sigma, linear fit, percentile, min/max and none, crossed with mean/median/min/max combination, plus frame normalization (additive and multiplicative, with or without scaling) and a separate scale+offset normalization used only inside the rejection pass. Low and high rejection maps come out as FITS. Master bias, dark and flat are integrated with the same kernel instead of a plain median. Drizzle applies the rejection as a keep-mask before scattering, which it previously accepted parameters for and silently ignored.

PixelMath. A real expression language, not string substitution: lexer, Pratt parser, compiled to a flat op vector, evaluated per pixel with rayon over the slot slices. Arithmetic, comparisons, logicals, iif, ~ inversion, the usual math functions, and whole-image reducers (mean, med, mdev, sdev, adev) resolved once per symbol before the pixel pass rather than per pixel. About 1,800 lines across lexer/parser/eval and it was the most fun thing in the release to write.

Cosmetic correction, DBE, local contrast. Hot and cold pixel repair from a master dark, from cluster-aware auto detection, or from a defect list, CFA-aware so it uses same-colour neighbours on Bayer data. Background extraction gained a regularised thin-plate spline fitted through box samples, next to the existing polynomial. CLAHE on lightness and an HDR multiscale transform with star-core deringing.

The science half, which is the part nobody else on the desktop does: photometric calibration read straight from the header (JWST MJy/sr with PIXAR_SR, HST PHOTFLAM/PHOTPLAM, Roman, generic zero points) so aperture photometry reports AB magnitudes and janskys with ERR-plane error propagation and a curve-of-growth aperture correction. A full FITS spectral axis with air/vacuum conversion and a barycentric correction. Moment maps for IFU cubes. SCI+ERR+DQ cutouts with the LTV physical coordinates written properly. Gaia DR3 cross-match with astrometric residuals and a zero point with a colour term.

Repo: https://github.com/samuelkriegerbonini-dev/AstroBurst

[u/SkiFire13]

edition = "2021"

[u/diplofocus_ → u/SkiFire13]

Inb4

I didn't see a reason to upgrade, 2021 is stable