autoastrom has a flexible extension mechanism,
implemented through plugins. At present, the only area of
the code which takes advantage of this is the part which
finds matches between the objects found on the CCD and those
in the downloaded object catalogue.
The program searches the directory pointed to by the
environment variable AUTOASTROM_DIR (see Section 4.1) for files which match the pattern
plugin-*.pl, and reads in all it finds. Each
such file must define a single subroutine, and assign a
reference to that subroutine to the
appropriate member of the hash %helpers.
autoastrom comes with a single plugin, to use Michael W
Richmond's match application for object matching.
To use this, specify `match' as the argument to the `match'
option, as --match=match (see Section 2.4.8). The plugin checks at runtime to see if the
match application is present in the directory
pointed to by AUTOASTROM_DIR, and the plugin will
not be installed if the application is not found.
autoastrom has been tested with match versions 0.3, 0.4 and
0.7.
If you wish to add further plugins, see the documentation
for the function match_positions. That is
given a plugin name, say `mymatch', and
searches for the entry
$helpers{plugin-match-mymatch}.