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Hi,I've just emailed this question to the STS helpdesk, but I thought I would also post it here as well, in case anyone can help me.Problem summary
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ellipse doesn't seem to read the image cursor command file when run
non-interactivelyFull description
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I am using the Iraf task ellipse to perform surface photometry in a
large set of images of nearby galaxies. The task is run
non-interactively within a cl script, which basically reads initial
guesses for the ellipticity and position angle for each galaxy from a
catalog, and then uses those values as initial values for the ellipse
fit (the ellipticity and PA are then left as free parameters during
the fit). The intial semimajor axis is set to an intermediate value,
to ensure that there's enough S/N but without going too close to the
galaxy center.In many cases -especially in galaxies with very large apparent sizes-,
ellipse seems to become quite sensitive to the initial values, so that
very slight variations will quickly yield an error code 4. Increasing
the number of iterations and maxgerr helps sometimes, but in general
the problem persists. If I run ellipse interactively and re-fit the
first ellipse, then the fit goes on correctly from there. Since I need
to run this task in batch mode for a large number of images, I created
a simple text file with the re-fit command "f", and used it as an
image cursor command file. However, I've noticed that ellipse will
only read that file when run interactively. If I do so, it will read
the command file and re-fit the first ellipse as indicated, and then
proceed from there. But if I set "interac" to "no", the command file
will be ignored and the first ellipse won't be re-fitted.Of course, running ellipse interactively increases the execution time,
even with a small display buffer size. I've tried adding "c" below "f"
in the command file to prevent ellipse from plotting subsequent
ellipses, but I still have to wait for the image and the bad pixel
mask to be loaded, which takes a while. I would therefore appreciate
any help on how to make ellipse read the cursor command file when run
non-interactively.Thanks!
Juan Carlos