MFITEXEC(1)

🌸 NAME 🌸

okay bestie, meet mFitExec — it's the Montage girlie that re-projects and mosaics your images, with background rectification. periodt.

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

mFitExec [-d] [-s statusfile] diffs.tbl fits.tbl diffdir

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

so basically mFitExec runs mFitplane on all the difference images that got identified by mOverlaps and generated by mDiff or mDiffExec. and then?? it creates a table of image-to-image difference parameters. that's the whole vibe. she's a table-making queen 👑

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -d — turns on debugging. yes she will be loud about it 🙈
• -s statusfile — writes the output message to statusfile instead of to stdout. shy girl behavior, love that for her 💅

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🦋 ARGUMENTS 🦋

• diffs.tbl — the overlap table generated by mOverlaps, and the last column of it contains the filenames of the difference images generated by mDiffExec.
• fits.tbl — the output table of difference parameters.
• diffdir — the directory containing the difference images.

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🌈 RESULT 🌈

she generates a table, fits.tbl, containing all the information generated by running mFitplane on each difference image. and the counts, bestie, the counts:

• nimages is the number of images for which this calculation was successfully performed 🫶
• nfaied is the number that generated an error condition for mFitplane 😭
• nwarning is the number that generated a warning ⚠️
• nmissing is the number of files that could not be found in the specified diffdir 💀

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⭐ MESSAGES ⭐

the group chat messages she might send you:

OK     [struct stat="OK", count=n, failed=nfailed, warning=nwarning, missing=nmissing]

ERROR  Cannot open status file: statusfile

ERROR  Can't open output file.

ERROR  Invalid diffs metadata file: filename

ERROR  Need columns: cntr1 cntr2 plus minus diff

ERROR  svc library error

not the ERROR spam 💀 if you see one of these, something in your setup is not slaying. read it, fix it, come back.

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🧚 EXAMPLES 🧚

first, diffs.tbl gets generated for a collection of reprojected images using mOverlap. next, mDiffExec is run on those images to create output images in the subdirectory diffdir. at this point, we are ready to run mFitExec — and honestly? main character moment:

$ mFitExec diffs.tbl fits.tbl diff
       [struct stat="OK", count=42, failed=0, warning=0, missing=0]

Output file: fits.tbl. ate and left no crumbs ✨

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💀 BUGS 💀

okay so here's the tea, and some of it is genuinely unserious:

• the drizzle algorithm has been implemented but has not been tested in this release. ngl, untested code is a vibe check she does not pass 🫠
• 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"]. yes, Windows line endings coming for you again 🙈
• 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). lowkey this one matters, don't skip it 🫶

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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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and that's the whole page, bestie 💖 this was Montage 5, dated Dec 2016 — MFITEXEC(1), signing off, mwah 🎀✨