pbrus / demulos

Software that generates a list of isolated stars in crowded fields. There are only two things required: an image in the FITS format and a list of all stars which have been found on this image.

Demulos

Program allows to select isolated stars in crowded fields. These stars can be used to determine the PSF model on an image.

Installation

Download the package wherever you want. Additionally you need to have installed the following software:

• gcc
• make
• some coreutils tools
• Python 2.7
  • numpy 1.13.1

Call the installation script using bash:

$ bash install

and set the destination directory for demulos and fwhm_av.py programs. Due to the fact that:

• you may have a lot of directories containing data from different observatories
• some parameters can be set inside the demulos.bash script

demulos.bash should be always located in the working directory (just make copies of the script to spread it into directories). Moreover you should have installed peak and dfits programs from the ESO eclipse library. I recommend to download the latest version: ftp://ftp.eso.org/pub/eclipse/eclipse-5.0.0/eclipse-main-5.0.0.tar.gz and compilte it according to the INSTALL file.

Usage

To use the program you need to prepare a single image in FITS format and a list of all stars in a text file. Both must be located in the working directory. Let's assume that an image is called image.fits and a list of all stars is called stars.dat. Before starting open the demulos.bash file and set some variables in the SET PARAMETERS section at the beginning of the script. Now it's time to run the program. Type into the terminal window:

$ bash demulos.bash --list stars.dat --image image.fits

These two arguments are mandatory. There is also one additional parameter which can be either set from the command line or in the SET PARAMETERS section:

$ bash demulos.bash --image image.fits --diff-mag 2.5 --list stars.dat

Note that the order of the arguments doesn't matter. After all the program generates the output file called stars.dat-demulos which contains isolated stars. This list can be used to determine the PSF model, particularly in dense stellar fields.

I encourage to visit my website to see more detailed description of this program. The current link can be found on my GitHub profile.

License

Demulos is licensed under the MIT license.