man mProjExec (1): Re-project and mosaic your images, with background rectification

SYNOPSIS

mProjExec [-p rawdir] [-d] [-e] [-X] [-b border] [-r restartrec] [-s statusfile] [-x scaleColumn] images.tbl template.hdr projdir stats.tbl

DESCRIPTION

An executive which runs mProject (or, if possible for the input/output projections, mProjectPP) for each image in an image metadata table. In the case of data cubes, mProjectCube will be used.

OPTIONS

-p rawdir: Specifies the path to the directory containing the images to be reprojected. If the -p switch is not included, mProjExec looks for the images in the current working directory.
-d: Turns on debugging
-e: Flag indicating output image should exactly match the FITS header template, and not crop off blank pixels
-X: Force reprojection of whole images, even if they exceed the area of the FITS header template
-b border: Ignore border width of pixels around edge of images
-r restartrec: Allows restart at record number restartrec, if mProjExec exits upon an error
-s statusfile: Output and errors are written to statusfile instead of being written to stdout.
-x scaleColumn: Turn on flux rescaling (e.g. magnitude zero point correction): scaleColumn is the name of a column in images.tbl which contains scale information.

ARGUMENTS

images.tbl: ASCII table (generated by mImgtbl) containing metadata for all images to be reprojected.
template.hdr: FITS header template to be used in generation of output FITS.
projdir: Directory in which to create reprojected images.
stats.tbl: Name of table for output statistics (time of each reprojection, or error messages).

RESULT

[struct stat="OK", count=16, failed=0, nooverlap=0]

For each input file name.fits in the table images.tbl, mProjExec creates a corresponding name.fits and name_area.fits in the directory projdir.

nimages is the number of images successfully processed, nfailed is the number of images mProject was unable to process, and noutside is the number of images that did not overlap with the given template.hdr.

The file stats.tbl is an ASCII table containing the filename, status, and time for each file.

MESSAGES

OK: [struct stat="OK", count=nimages, failed=nfailed, nooverlap=noutside]
ERROR: MPI initialization failed
ERROR: Path (outdir) is not a directory
ERROR: Restart index value string n cannot be interpreted as an integer
ERROR: Restart index value n must be greater than or equal to zero
ERROR: Cannot open status file: statusfile
ERROR: Can't open output file.
ERROR: Can't open tmp status file.
ERROR: Can't delete tmp status file.
ERROR: Need column fname in input
ERROR: Need column scaleCol in input
ERROR: Output would overwrite input
ERROR: Template file template.hdr not found
ERROR: Output wcsinit() failed
ERROR: mProject or mProjectPP error

EXAMPLES

The following example runs mProjExec on a directory containing 16 images. The -f switch specifies that mProjExec will use mProjectPP to reproject the files, as opposed to mProject. Relevant files are images.tbl, generated by mImgtbl, and template.hdr. Files will be created in the directory projdir.

$ mProjExec -p raw images.tbl template.hdr proj stats.tbl: [struct stat="OK", count=16, failed=0, nooverlap=0]

See output file stats.tbl.

BUGS

The drizzle algorithm has been implemented but has not been tested in this release.

If a header template contains carriage returns (i.e., created/modified on a Windows machine), the cfitsio library will be unable to read it properly, resulting in the error: [struct stat="ERROR", status=207, msg="illegal character in keyword"]

It is best for the background correction algorithms if the area described in the header template completely encloses all of the input images in their entirety. If parts of input images are "chopped off" by the header template, the background correction will be affected. We recommend you use an expanded header for the reprojection and background modeling steps, returning to the originally desired header size for the final coaddition. The default background matching assumes that there are no non-linear background variations in the individual images (and therefore in the overlap differences). If there is any uncertainty in this regard, it is safer to turn on the "level only" background matching (the "-l" flag in mBgModel.

COPYRIGHT

2001-2015 California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California

If your research uses Montage, please include the following acknowledgement: "This research made use of Montage. It is funded by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number ACI-1440620, and was previously funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Earth Science Technology Office, Computation Technologies Project, under Cooperative Agreement Number NCC5-626 between NASA and the California Institute of Technology."

The Montage distribution includes an adaptation of the MOPEX algorithm developed at the Spitzer Science Center.