pymovie 4.1.12

PyMovie is a lightcurve extractor for astronomical videos

PyMovie

PyMovie is a simple (hopefully) application for extracting lightcurves from occultation videos.

It is specially designed to be robust in both star tracking and data extraction when the video has been disturbed by wind-shake.

The name was chosen out of respect and deference to LiMovie, a pioneer application published many years ago. This application has fewer ‘bells and whistles’ than LiMovie and so should be easier to use for a newbie.

Installing

Windows: download the executable (easiest)

Windows users can skip the Python toolchain entirely. Go to the latest release page and download PyMovie.exe from the Assets section. Double-click to run — no installation, no Python setup required. The executable bundles its own Python runtime and all dependencies.

The first activation will take extra time because it will be downloading the proper version of Python and all the other dependencies. Subsequent activations will only tkae a few seconds.

To update later, just download the newer PyMovie.exe from the release page and replace the old one.

If you’d rather run from source (all platforms), follow the uv-based instructions below.

Installing from source (any platform)

PyMovie uses uv to manage its Python environment. You do not need Python pre-installed — uv will automatically download the correct version (3.10) on first run.

Step 1. Install uv (one line, user-scope, no admin rights required).

Windows, in PowerShell:

powershell -c "irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.ps1 | iex"

macOS or Linux, in a terminal:

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

Close and reopen your terminal afterwards so the new uv command is on your PATH.

Step 2. Get the PyMovie source. Either clone with git:

git clone https://github.com/bob-anderson-ok/pymovie.git
cd pymovie

or download the repository as a ZIP from the GitHub page, unzip it, and cd into the extracted folder.

Step 3. Launch PyMovie:

uv run pymovie

On first run, uv downloads Python 3.10 (if not already present), installs the pinned dependencies from uv.lock into a local .venv folder, and opens the PyMovie window. Subsequent runs are near-instant.

Updating

To pick up a new PyMovie release:

git pull
uv run pymovie

uv automatically re-syncs the environment whenever uv.lock has changed, so there is nothing else to do.

Troubleshooting

• “uv: command not found” — close and reopen your terminal, or follow the PATH instructions printed by the uv installer.

• Windows SmartScreen warning on the uv installer — click More info → Run anyway. The installer is published by Astral.

• Corporate proxy / firewall issues — uv honours standard HTTPS_PROXY and HTTP_PROXY environment variables.