Documentation for 2MASS Coadds Painting Utilities

I've written several scripts to simplify examination of 2MASS coadds from within skyview and Netscape. In an effort to reduce the number of different scripts I have to maintain I've folded various options that used to be part of different scripts into a set of environment variables the user can customize to taste.

All of these scripts will give basic usage info if called without any arguments.

coadds & ccoadds

These scripts allow quick "live" painting of greyscale & 3-color images respectively within skyview. A 24-bit monitor is required for 3-color images. These are typically called within the sNNN/image directory.

Typical calling syntax follows:

coadds *.fits   [paint up all fits files]
coadds j*.fits   [paint all j images]
coadds *103.fits   [paint J, H, & K separately for coadd 103]
coadds hi0090044 ji0090068 ji0090138   [paint the specified coadds]
ccoadds *.fits   [paint all coadds in 3-color]
ccoadds *103.fits   [paint coadd 103 in 3-color]

To erase the extended source overlays within skyview type:

er go
er ro
er bo

ccoadds_multi

This script creates a series of jpegs of a scan's coadds and an html page that displays them. Since this can be viewed directly in Netscape, it allows color composites to be viewed even on an 8-bit monitor. The script must be called from the night root directory, specifying the scans to image:

ccoadds_multi 009 010 025 120 [creates jpegs for the listed scans]

Note that the jpegs take about 1 MB of disk space per scan (twice this if you have enabled extended source overlays; see below).

Environment Variables

The functioning of these scripts may be customized by setting environment variables before they are called. All of the scripts allow the display range to be customized using the variable:

coadds_range

The default value is "1% 1%+30" (displaying a range from the lower 1% to 30 DN above this). For galactic plane scans it's useful to set a higher limit like "1% 1%+120". It is also possible to use relative lower and upper ranges like "1% 99.9%" or absolute ranges like "620 650".

For color coadds, it is also possible to specifically override each color channel for the 3 bands using:

coadds_jrange
coadds_hrange
coadds_krange

One useful application is if you want to force all of the coadds in a scan to have the same lower & upper ranges so they can be directly compared to one another, but of course the levels would need to be adjusted separately for each band.

Users of the ccoadds_multi script should also set the following environment variables in their .cshrc so that the jpegs will be copied over to a local scratch disk:

coadds_host [user's host machine name]
coadds_rmtdir [desired local directory for jpeg files]

It is also possible to set a switch telling ccoadds_multi to also create jpegs including the extended source marks as well as the plain images. To do this creating the following environment variable (using any value):

coadds_extd

A typical .cshrc entry would look like:

# Definitions for coadds painting scripts
setenv coadds_host "vorlon"
setenv coadds_rmtdir "/scr/2mass"
setenv coadds_extd "yes"

To get rid of the extended source jpegs you could use the following command:

unsetenv coadds_extd

To reset all the range defaults you could type:

coadds_jrange "150 170"
coadds_hrange "1% 99%"
coadds_krange "1% 1%+50"
coadds_range "1% 99.99%"

Note that the coadds_range value is always used for greyscale plots using coadds, but is only used by ccoadds if the individual J, H, & K ranges have not been set.

Robert Hurt, 2/24/99