MFLATTENEXEC(1)

💖 MFLATTENEXEC(1) 💖

okay bestie, sit down, we're doing Montage today. this is mFlattenExec, a whole little program whose entire job is removing the background from an image. that's it. that's the gig. and honestly? she ate. 🎀

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✨ NAME ✨

mFlattenExec — remove the background from an image 🧚

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

mFlattenExec [-p imgdir] [-d] [-n(o-areas)] [-s statusfile] images.tbl
flatdir

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so like, this is a two-for-one situation. mFlattenExec runs both mFitPlane and mBackground on a set of images, back to back, no cap. that's literally the whole description. iconic. 💅

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👑 OPTIONS 👑

• -p imgdir — tells it where the images live, aka the path to the directory containing the images to be flattened. show her the way. 🫶
• -d — turns on debugging. she's gonna be loud about what she's doing.
• -n — the no-area-images flag, meaning mFlattenExec should not require area images for all the input FITS images. lowkey a vibe. (also written as -n(o-areas) in the synopsis, just so you know what the vibe is.)
• -s statusfile — output and errors get sent to statusfile instead of to stdout. quiet mode, main character energy, we love a girl who journals. 📓

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🍓 ARGUMENTS 🍓

• images.tbl — the metadata table (generated by mImgtbl) that describes the images to be flattened. she's the receipt. 🧾
• flatdir — path to the directory where the output files should be created. new folder, new me. ✨

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🌈 RESULT 🌈

creates "flattened" versions of each input FITS image. periodt.

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💬 MESSAGES 💬

• OK — [struct stat="OK", count=nimages, failed=nfailed, warning=nwarnings]
• ERROR — Cannot open status file: statusfile
• ERROR — Cannot access flatdir
• ERROR — flatdir is not a directory
• ERROR — Invalid image metadata file: filename
• ERROR — Need column 'file' in image metadata file filename
• ERROR — mDiff or mBackground error

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⭐ EXAMPLES ⭐

look at her go:

$ mFlattenExec output/images.tbl output/flattened
       [struct stat="OK", count=5, failed=0, warning=0]

count=5, failed=0, warning=0?? she did that. 😭💖

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💀 BUGS 💀

okay so, not everything is perfect, and we need to be honest:

• the drizzle algorithm has been implemented but has not been tested in this release. like. it's there. we don't know her. 🙈
• if a header template contains carriage returns (i.e., it was created or modified on a Windows machine), the cfitsio library will be unable to read it properly, and you'll get this error: [struct stat="ERROR", status=207, msg="illegal character in keyword"]. 💀
• it's 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. so: 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. also the default background matching assumes there are no non-linear background variations in the individual images (and therefore in the overlap differences). if there's any uncertainty about that, it's safer to turn on the "level only" background matching — that's the -l flag in mBgModel. noted. 📝

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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, Montage 5, dated Dec 2016, and yes this manual page itself is MFLATTENEXEC(1). go flatten some backgrounds, you're gonna slay 🎀💖✨