MMAKEIMG(1)

💖 MMAKEIMG — mMakeImg 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the Montage manual page for mMakeImg — yes it's the Montage one, the manual name you keep seeing in the corner is literally just Montage, and this whole page is about generating synthetic FITS images. sit down, hydrate, let's go ✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

mMakeImg — Generate synthetic FITS images

like. that's the whole job description. it makes fake-but-real FITS images 🦋

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

mMakeImg [-d level] [-n noise_level] [-b bg1 bg2 bg3 bg4] [-t tbl col
width epoch mag] template.hdr out.fits

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💫 DESCRIPTION 💫

So here's the vibe: mMakeImg generates synthetic FITS images, with varying levels of noise, from a table of provided point sources. that's the whole thing. you hand it a table, it hands you an image. iconic behavior honestly 👑

Each source is treated independently — no group chat drama between them — and its flux gets distributed on a source-specific point-spread function. every star gets its own lil glow. periodt 💅

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -d level — turns on debugging to the specified level (1-4). detective mode, bestie 🔍
• -n noise_level — random noise equal to noise_level gets added to the image background. specified random noise, exactly that amount, no cap.
• -b bg1 bg2 bg3 bg4 — specifies the four corners for a 'tilted' background for the image. each value is a floating point number specifying the background height at the corner. four corners, four numbers, tilted gradient, slay.
• -f — use a uniform flat disk for sources rather than gaussians. flat disk era 🫓
• -r — replace pixel values rather than adding to them. no blending, full override, main character energy.
• -t tbl col width epoch mag — specifies a table of sources to be added to the raw image. breaking it down for you:
  • tbl is the table filename
  • col is the column name which contains the source fluxes
  • width is a floating point number determining the point spread of each source
  • epoch is the coordinate system reference year
  • mag is the reference magnitude of the source list

In addition, the source table should have ra and dec columns for the image positions. (yes, you need them. the source needs to know where it lives 😭)

Several input tables can be specified if desired through repeated use of the -t flag and arguments. stack 'em up, bestie 🌈

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🧚 ARGUMENTS 🧚

• template.hdr — FITS header template, used to indicate the desired parameters of the output image. this is the blueprint, the mood board, the vision ✨
• out.fits — Path of FITS image to be generated. where your baby gets written 💖

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🌟 RESULT 🌟

Synthetic FITS output image; sources in image will represent the values from the input table(s). literally what you asked for, delivered 💅

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💌 MESSAGES 💌

• OK — [struct stat="OK"] 🎉
• ERROR — Can't open table table tbl 😭
• ERROR — Can't find lon, lat columns 💀
• ERROR — Can't find flux/magnitude column 'col' 🙈
• ERROR — Template file [template.hdr] not found 🍓
• ERROR — Output wcsinit() failed. Exiting. 🚪
• ERROR — FITS library error 😵

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🌈 EXAMPLES 🌈

$ mMakeImg -n 0.01 -b 0 1.0 1.0 0 -t sources.tbl J_MAG 5.0 2000 10.0 template.hdr out.fits
[struct stat="OK"]

and yes bestie, it returns [struct stat="OK"]. we love a success story 🫶

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👑 BUGS 👑

okay this is the serious part, pay attention, no scrolling past 👇

• The drizzle algorithm has been implemented but has not been tested in this release. so. it exists. that's all we can promise.
• 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"]. windows line endings really said "not today" 💀
• 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).

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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, and you just read MMAKEIMG(1) — go make some synthetic images, you absolute icon 🌟💖 byeeee 🦋