Allframe

I've been learning how to use Allframe through a lot of reading and a lot of doing.

Allframe:

Allframe needs 4 types of input files:
1) .als files for each individual exposure output by Allstar
2) .psf files for each individual exposure output by DAOphot
3) a single .mag file that DAOMaster outputs
4) a single .mch that DAOMaster outputs


Generating these:
1) .als
I used the batch_als.py code to iterate DAOphot and Allstar twice for each individual exposure. I'll use the second (better) .als files to input to Allframe. (These are suffixed with ".als" by batch_als, not to be confused with the first pass allstar outputs which are suffixed with ".als1". )

2) .psf
Again, I got this as an output from the batch_als.py run. Again, I'll use the second-pass files, which are denoted by ".psf2".

Interim Step: DAOMatch (preliminary .mch file)

These Stetson procedures are finding/matching up stars for me. I used the Allframe "cookbook" for this part, but got a lot of parameter advice from Ricardo and also referred to the "guinea pig" publication that Stetson sends out as well as the DAOphot manual.

Right now I'm testing with only the 20 exposures of Chip7. Ultimately, I'll have a .mch file for each chip which contains transformations for all 20 exposures on this chip. This .mch is NOT the file to input to Allframe, but rather a preliminary guess to be input to DAOMaster.

I'm using the following input parameters, which are subject to change but I either got from the cookbook or from Ricardo, where Ricardo's advice obviously superseded the cookbook.

DAOmatch inputs:
--Each exposure on a single chip, both bands
--output: chipN.mch

3/4) DAOMaster
The input for DAOMaster is the .mch file I generate for each chip using DAOMatch. Unfortunately, that output contains two extraneous columns (the last two) that DAOMaster doesn't like. So they have to be erased before running DAOMaster. After they're gone, the single chipN.mch file gets input into DAOMaster.

--Min, Min fraction, Enough = 1, 0.05, 1
--Maximum Sigma = 10
--Degrees of Freedom = 20 (R: 6)
--Critical Match-up Radius = 10 (decreasing by integers to 1, re-running 1 a few times til # of stars is constant)
--Assign new star IDs: y
--mean mags and scatter: y (chipN.mag)
--new transformation file: y (chipN.mch)
--all other files: n

The file that contains the mean stellar magnitudes and scatters is suffixed by .mag. That's the star list input to Allframe. The file of updated transformations between chips is suffixed by .mch and that's the final input for Allframe.


Current Status:

Beth and I took a look at Ricardo's allframe.opt file and decided to make some changes to our allframe.opt and allstar.opt files. Because I this, I have to re-run batch_als.py on all files, which is a bit time consuming.

I'm changing the options so that inner sky=2 and outer sky=20. I changed my allstar.opt to agree with Ricardo on the profile error (=0.5 as opposed to my 0.0), since I have to re-run Allstar anyway. I also used a geometric coefficient of 20 (different from Ricardo's 6) in allframe.opt because our data was taken over the course of a few nights. Maximum iterations was lowered from the default 200 to Ricardo and the cookbook's suggestion of 50 to save time. All other parameters agree with Ricardo's allframe.opt file and nothing else was changed in the allstar.opt file from before.

I'm running the batch_als.py for the 20 exposures on Chip 7 first so that it's sure to be ready for Allframing overnight. Once batch_als.py finish, I have to run DAOmatch and DAOMaster to get all 4 files for input into Allframe and then let her rip. As soon as I start everything running for Allframe, I'm going to run batch_als.py on all exposures of all chips. Once all of that is running, I'm going to return to my code that should automate DAOmatch since I never got that working properly.

Once all of Allframe input files I'll start them all Allframing, which should be ready by the time I get home tonight.

Tomorrow:

Check out my awesome Allframe results.
Figure out how to throw out all the junk Allframe gave me.