Other Codes

This is a link collection and short description of other codes related to photutils.

In most cases we can't use their code because they have incompatible licenses, but we can use them to generate reference results for photutils tests and where possible cooperate with them by implementing I/O for the file formats they support.

Astromatic

Astromatic software is a suite of command line tools written by Emmanuel Bertin in C and released with a GPL3+ license. The most well-known tool is SExtractor, but some of the other tools like e.g. PSFEx also do things that we want to implement in photutils.

The tools work with ascii config and FITS files and support VOTable as result output format (and sometimes input) ... maybe we should support these formats in photutils for easy interoperability with e.g. SExtractor and PSFEx?

If you download the code from SVN there are tests directories with test data ... maybe these can be re-used for photutils (I'm not sure if the license applies to the data files as well). They also made a large reference dataset of Galaxy images that could be useful e.g. to benchmark what is possible with photutils.

I haven't seen anyone trying to directly interface to the Astromatic codes from Python (would require re-factoring of the C code into libraries, I think), but several astronomers (see e.g. here and here or here) have written Python "wrappers" that call Astromatic tools via subprocess ... just like Tom's montage-wrapper does for Montage. Probably this is not welcome in photutils, but there could be an astromatic-wrapper Astropy-affiliated package ... for photutils here I'm mainly mentioning the Astromatic tools because I want to use them to generate reference test datasets.

To install the software on Mac use Macports:

sudo port install eye missfits scamp sextractor skymaker stiff stuff swarp weightwatcher

or for the development version (which includes the test data)

svn checkout https://astromatic.iap.fr/pubsvn/software/sextractor/trunk sextractor
cd sextractor
./configure --with-fftw-libdir=/opt/local/lib --with-fftw-incdir=/opt/local/include --with-atlas-libdir=/opt/local/lib --with-atlas-incdir=/opt/local/include
make
make check

Note that the Macports packages are currently outdated (https://trac.macports.org/ticket/43536), PSFEx is not available (https://trac.macports.org/ticket/43537) and SCAMP doesn't work (https://trac.macports.org/ticket/34746).

IRAF

IRAF contains some methods that have been re-implemented the DAOFIND and STARFIND methods in findobj by Larry Bradley and will soon land in photutils. If you want to run those codes (e.g. to generate reference results for photutils tests) you can use PyRAF by installing Ureka.

IDL

TODO: Write me!