Installation

Normally the aposong software will be run on the song1m machine at APO, where it is installed under the song account.

Under some circumstances, users may wish to have a local installation on their computer. To access devices at APO, the computer must be on the APO internal network (either physically or via VPN). To access devices in the lab at NMSU, the computer must be on the NMSU network (either physically or via VPN).

The most reliable method of installation is to create a Python virtual environment specifically for aposong and install the aposong software into it through an editable installation.

To achieve this, first create a new environment. If you are using Anaconda, you can create a new virtual environment with:

conda env create --name aposong python=3.12   (anything above 3.9 should work)
conda activate aposong

Alternatively, you can use Python venv if you are running a python>=3.9:

python -m venv aposong
source aposong/bin/activate  (in bash)

Editable installation into Python distribution

You can download aposong from github, and do an editable install:

git clone https://github.com/holtzmanjon/aposong
cd aposong
pip install -e .

Configuration

The file aposong/aposong.yml contains IP addresses of ASCOM servers, e.g. on the telescope computer, the dome computer, and the spectrograph computer. If any of these are not available, the code will take some time to time out, which can be avoided by commenting out (with a leading #) the servers that are not available.