Future project page for development of an aperture photometry program for time series photometry.
When I first started obtaining and reducing data, the tools which I was taught to use were IRAF (Image Reduction and Aalysis Facility) for image reductions, ccd_hsp (an IRAF package) for aperture photometry, and WQED for light curve extraction. While these are all powerful tools, the primary challenge they pose to new users is their ease of installation. For me, it took several weeks to get everything working properly. IRAF has been around since the 1980s and has been so fundamentally important to astronomers, people still try to install it on new computers despite the pain they know is waiting for them. This process can be so painful at times that once astronomers finally get IRAF working, many will then refuse to ever update their operating systems for fear of breaking something. Actually, installation isn’t always difficult thanks to the efforts of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), but many IRAF tasks have 32-bit dependencies that are no longer supported on some modern machines and OS’s (MacOS Catalina for example), and STScI no longer provides institutional support for IRAF. A full replacement for IRAF in modern coding languages still doesn’t exist, though small pieces have been re-written in Astropy and various other Python packages.