MOPEX User's Guide - IRSA

2.3.1 Additional Functionality
MOPEX User’s Guide
While the reduction process described above includes the most commonly used processing stages,
there are many more functions available in MOPEX to carry out a more specialized reduction.
See both §2.4 and Appendix A for more details.
2.3.2 Expected Input
MOPEX only requires a list of FITS images for basic mosaicking, but the additional files listed
below will generally prove helpful:
• A set of FITS data images;
• Associated uncertainty images;
• Associated status masks, flagging bad pixels in each individual data frame (in Spitzer
data, these are called DCE Status Masks, where DCE = Data Collection Event);
• Relevant masks of permanent detector artifacts (in Spitzer data, these are called PMasks).
For Spitzer data, all of the masks and calibration files can be downloaded from the Spitzer
archive with your data. Permanently-damaged-pixel masks (PMasks) and PRF files are also
stored in the mopex/cal/ directory that comes with your MOPEX installation. Template namelists
are accessible through the File menu in the GUI and from the subdirectory mopex/cdf/. See
Chapter 3 for more information about the format of MOPEX input files.
MOPEX is set up for input data in units of surface brightness. It can recognize two units in the
FITS header keyword BUNIT: MJy/sr or microJy/arcsec^2 (BUNIT is a text string and there are
alternate ways of writing these units, but MOPEX will recognize several variants). If it recognizes
the units, output mosaic will be in those units, and extracted source flux densities will be in
microJy. If it doesn’t recognize the units, all data will be treated as dimensionless “counts”.
2.4 Introducing the Major Pipelines in MOPEX
The major pipelines available in MOPEX are as follows:
Overlap: Performs additive background matching of the input BCD images to
bring them to a common background level and thereby avoid
“patchy” mosaics.
Overview of MOPEX 11
Introducing the Major Pipelines in MOPEX