MBGEXEC(1)

💅 MBGEXEC — the mBgExec page, bestie edition 👑

okay so real talk, this is the MBGEXEC(1) manual page from Montage, and it's all about a little command called mBgExec. she runs mBackground over every single image in a metadata table. every one. no skips. 💖

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✨ NAME ✨

mBgExec — run mBackground on all the images in a metadata table 🦋

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

mBgExec [-p projdir] [-s statusfile] [-d] [-n(o-areas)] images.tbl
corrections.tbl corrdir

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so basically 💁‍♀️ mBgExec runs mBackground on every image in a metadata table, using the corrections that mFitExec generated. that's it, that's the whole vibe. she's the one who actually applies the glow-up to all your pics at once. ✨

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

• -p projdir — tells her where the projected images are chillin'. this is the path to the directory holding them. 📁
• -s statusfile — writes the output message to statusfile instead of to stdout. quiet girl behavior, we love it. 🤫
• -d — turns on debugging. she's gonna be so chatty. 🐛
• -n — indicates that no area images are present. this assumes equal weighting for each pixel, no cap. ⚖️

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🫶 ARGUMENTS 🫶

• images.tbl — the image metadata table, generated by mImgtbl. 📋
• corrections.tbl — the table of corrections, generated by mFitExec. ✨
• corrdir — the directory where the output images should be written. this is where the magic lands. 🏠

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👑 RESULT 👑

output FITS images get created in the directory specified by corrdir, with names that are the same as the uncorrected images. so like, same name, new corrected energy. iconic. 🔥

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😭 MESSAGES 😭

• OK — [struct stat="OK", count=num-images, nocorrection=num-skipped, failed=num-failed]
• ERROR — MPI initialization failed
• ERROR — Cannot open status file: statusfile
• ERROR — Cannot access corrdir
• ERROR — corrdir is not a directory
• ERROR — Invalid image metadata file: images.tbl
• ERROR — Need columns: cntr and fname in image list
• ERROR — Too many entries in image list for compiled program
• ERROR — mBackground error

not me getting an error message 💀 but fr fr, if you see one of these, that's what's up.

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🌈 EXAMPLES 🌈

in this example, images.tbl describes the unprojected or projected images (the filenames are the same if mProjExec was used), and corrections.tbl was generated using mBgModel after running mDiffExec and mFitExec on those images. the full pipeline, she ate. 💖

$ mBgExec -p proj images.tbl corrections.tbl corr
       [struct stat="OK", count=16, failed=0]

and now corr contains the images with background removal applied. periodt. 💅

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💀 BUGS 💀

• the drizzle algorithm has been implemented but has not been tested in this release. it's giving "we wrote it, we didn't check it." 🙈
• if a header template contains carriage returns (like, if it was created/modified on a Windows machine 🪟), the cfitsio library will be unable to read it properly, resulting in this 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, then return 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).

bestie please read that third one twice, it's not a vibe, it's a warning. 🚨

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📜 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. 🌌

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okay that's the whole page, you're so welcome 🫶 Montage 5, dated Dec 2016 — go run some background correction, you got this, slay 💖✨