// the find
FHiRE-spectrograph/FHiRE-Refractor
A Python (mislabeled as C) GUI tool for automating telescope pointing at the Wyoming Infrared Observatory — specifically for aligning a target star with the FHiRE spectrograph fiber using a Raspberry Pi HQ camera and DS9. Very niche: this is operational lab code for one specific telescope, not a general astronomy library.
Solves a real, fiddly problem (fiber alignment) with a concrete automated workflow rather than manual eyeballing. Integrating RPi HQ camera RAW capture with FITS conversion via cr2fits/PyDNG is a reasonable hardware-to-science-format pipeline. The DS9 XPA integration for centroiding is the right tool for the job in observatory software.
Zero stars, no activity since 2021 — effectively abandoned observatory-specific code with no community. Classes were copy-pasted from separate modules directly into refractor_main.py rather than imported, leaving dead files in records/. Hardcoded assumptions about Claudius (the observatory control system) and the WIRO telescope make this useless anywhere else. No tests, no error handling documented, and the RPi-must-have-internet requirement for XPA is a fragile constraint that will silently break in offline observatory environments.