Great work! (both for dokeeffe but also for all the people involved in indi/ekos)
Jasem, some years ago I used to do photometry (both exoplanets and variable stars) with gcx:
gcx.sourceforge.net/
github.com/cmatei/GCX
(cmatei tried to add some INDI support but I don't know the current state)
Anyway, the first link contains a lot of documentation and all the math involved is sound and well described.