Displaying wavdetect & other source catalogs
Source catalogs produced by wavdetect are FITS binary tables, and can
thus be examined and manipulated by a wide variety of FITS-compatible tools,
notably fv. See the Recipe page on placing
wavdetect sources onto an ACIS image. P. Broos also suggests
the following IDL tools:
IDL GUI TO DISPLAY, EDIT, AND MATCH CATALOGS
The IDL program combine_catalogs, discussed here,
can be used to display, edit, and match sources from multiple FITS catalogs. Unfortunately, the display is a simple plot and does NOT include the image
underneath.
IDL CATALOG DATABASE PACKAGE
The IDL Astro library
from W. Landsman (GSFC) contains a package called "Database Procedures" (DB*)
that may be helpful in managing your ACIS source lists (produced by wavdetect).
These routines, which largely duplicate ftool functionalities, perform simple
manipulations on a catalog such as printing and searching. A particular
convenience of the IDL database package is that source positions are stored
both as real numbers and sexigesimal strings.
Documentation can be found here,
and locally at Penn State here (Note:
Tex-files).
P. Broos has written an IDL program to convert a wavdetect source list
(in FITS binary tables) to an astrolib "database". It is called db_from_ciao.pro
and is called within IDL as follows:
IDL> db_from_ciao,'Field','Field.sources'
where Field.sources is the wavdetect source list produced by CIAO.
Four files are created in the current directory: Field.dbd, Field.dbf, Field.dbh,
and Field.dbx. After creating these files, it is convenient to run the dbhelp
and dbprint commands to give you a sample of the DB* commands available in the
astrolib.