It is seldom sufficient to measure the brightness or position of an object in just one image. This leads to greater reliability, greater accuracy, and greater sensitivity to very faint stars. The basic software that I provide to people consists of about 20,000 lines of code. Of course, many of those lines have been written and rewritten several times. In addition, I have written at least 80,000 lines of related code for testing and experimenting, and I guess roughly 14,000 lines of documentation.
Science is fun.
It lets you use YOUR brain and YOUR creativity to solve problems that have never been solved before. Science is a whole-world endeavor, and lets you interact with and help and be helped by people all over the world. I knew that you were a gentleman and a scholar.