Munipack ‒ Basic Usage

Munipack offers a set of computer routines as tools for various kinds of astronomical photometry.

All utilities are prepared as independent software tools, whereas every utility is intended to done only one task. All operations will be done without any interaction with user during run, so it is suitable for running of extensive batch processing. It is supposed that the utilities will be combined in a concrete way to done some specific processing.

From the practical point of view, Munipack offers set of shell utilities which uses standard input, switches and standard output as in the same manner as all other tools in system. Both input and output interaction is implemented via plain text or FITS files providing easy way to modify and use of results of computation. Every shell utility can be replaced by an another one to better fit of a solved problem. That, Munipack's routines may be a base for a derived package.

There are two types of interface which may be used for data processing. A simple, but perhaps less general way, is offered by a graphical interface. The full functionality is provided by a set of command line utilities.

Graphical interface

To start of Munipack's graphical user interface (GUI), run following command (usually via a graphical terminal)

bash$ xmunipack

The interface provided by xmunipack is intended for an interactive data processing. It provides GUI to all command line utilities so you can interactive select images with various attributes, display them by different ways, made basic and advanced operations, etc.

Command line interface

The core of Munipack is a set of utilities which are listed in the following table:

Some external utilities can be used as additional tools.

All routines are used in a common way. If we will run any utility without parameters, some on-line help will print:

DARKBAT Version 1.9, Copyright (C) 1997-08 F.Hroch, Masaryk University,Brno,CZ

DARKBAT   Utility for the dark frame subtract.

Usage:darkbat [options] [@dirfile] [dark=darkframe] [mask=?] [image1] ...

@dirfile= file with image names for dark subtract, no wildcards *,?
          (use only '@' to read image names from standard input)
dark= dark frame image
image1...= name(s) of simple image(s) to dark subtract
bitpix=[8,16,-32] set bitpix of output to specified value
mask= output mask (default = dout????.fits)
      give 'mask=.' for overwrite input files (carefully!)
      give 'mask=$' for copy files with original basename to current dir

options:
	-d <darkname>	 dark frame image (equivalent with 'dark=')
	-o <mask>	 output mask (equivalent with 'mask=')
	-c <number>	 counter initial value (default = 1)
	-h	 give this help
	-L	 display software license

There is a common way of usage of all command-line utilities. Every utility reads names of files to process (mostly FITS images) from standard input, setup some parameters by command switches, done a processing and save output to (mostly) FITS images. These images can be processed again by another tools or any another utilities.

The parameters of command switches are usually specified as strings in format par=<value> and user is resposible to specify its value. To setup of reading of standard input, the switch @ is used. Note that the used syntax is Iraf-like.

As common example, we had choose subtraction of a dark frame from a set of scientific exposures. If we have a dark frame in FITS file darkframe.fits and scientific exposures in m666_1R.fits, m666_2R.fits, the dark frame can be subtracted with the command:

 sh$ ls m666_1R.fits, m666_2R.fits | darkbat @ dark=darkframe.fits

The corrected images will available as dout0001.fits and dout0002.fits. The filename can be changed by parameter mask=. For example, the command

 sh$ ls m666_1R.fits, m666_2R.fits | darkbat @ dark=darkframe.fits mask=m666_?Rd.fits

will save images to m666_1Rd.fits and m666_2Rd.fits. Usually, observed non-processsed data are archived in a directory (with read only access) and we are working in another directory, commonly named as working directory. That, we can use another form of mask= option which will be save processed images to current working directory with the same filename:

 sh$ ls m666_1R.fits, m666_2R.fits | darkbat @ dark=darkframe.fits mask=$