Image Reduction with FITSTools

Arno Riffeser and me jointly developed the first implementation of the WeCAPP reduction pipeline. While this pipeline is still being improved, many of the small programs might prove useful to other people who want to modify FITS files from a shell command line or have some tools which propagate errors along with image manipulation or simply have some coding examples for the LTL (little template library by Niv Drory, Claus Gössl, Jan Snigula).
Error propagation and high computational & I/O performance. That's what my FITSTools are all about. If you need a starter on why and how propagate errors in image reduction have a look at 2002A+A381.1095G.pdf and P4.4.pdf. If you are more interested in the implementation techniques read this contribution to the ADASS 2003 conference.

The Source Code

To build the FITSTools you first need to get, build, and install the latest (July 2019) LTL stable branch version. So follow the previous link, download the sources, and try ...

tar xvzf ltl-2.0.22.tar.gz
cd ltl-2.0.22
./configure --prefix=$HOME
make
make check
make install

If that doesn't work, it's probably because you have an "outdated" C++ compiler. This newer version of the LTL already supports FITSFiles > 2GB, FITS image extensions, memory mapped arrays, FITS WCS etc. But some of those features are still in testing. With a working LTL you can now download the FITSTools sources (July 2019) and untar, configure and make / make install them just like the LTL. Don't forget to add the paths to the LTL includes and libs!

tar xvzf fitstools-2.3.tar.gz
cd fitstools-2.3
./configure --with-ltl=$HOME --prefix=$HOME 
make
make install

See the effects neglected by simple error estimates when processing images. One hour light in R2 filter band at Wendelstein 0.8 m telescope:

Name	EGB 0427
Image	JPG, 417 kb
Error Image	JPG, 412 kb

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Last revision: August, 2019