Re: Common and uncommon goals and software

[Tom Droege <tdroege@veriomail.com>]

I have been reading this thread and trying to see if we have a 
consensus.  It would seem that Jure's last post meets all objections.

I have one comment.  Should not the header include the processing steps 
applied to the data?  For example, we might have a star list, then a star 
list corrected for air mass.  I would show this by simply listing in the 
header all the programs that have processed the data so far with their 
version numbers.  This could be put in one of the comment positions.  A 
processing program would just read this list, append it's name, and rewrite 
it in the same comment in it's output.   This would allow a "Woops" when 
one attempted to merge two star lists which had undergone different processing.

If the below is acceptable to all, then I would like to make it a TN, and 
get on with processing data.  Please make objections as soon as 
possible.  Note this is just the format for exchanging star lists.  There 
will be other formats for images.

Tom Droege
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Jure writes:

Taking my yesterday's summary and Arne's further suggestions (hopefully all)
into account, we come to the following scheme:


Header
-----------
JD Julian Day
FILTER
EXPOSURE exposure time
DATE-OBS start of observing (date + time)
OBSERVER observatory code or information how to get observatory coordinates
RA-CENTER
DEC-CENTER
CRVAL1, CRVAL2, etc..
PLATE constants
APERTURE_SIZE (diameter in pixels)
PSFFUNCTION ? (I guess this would be needed)

Table
------------
XT, YT image coordinates
SXT, SXT error estimates for the above
PSFMAG, PSFMAGERR magnitude and error estimate obtained by PSF
APERTUREMAG, APERTUREMAGERR magnitude by aperture method
FWHMX, FWHMY star shape useful for quality control
ROUNDNESS, SHARPNESS (additional shape parameters)
PEAK_DN (to decide whether a star is saturated, etc.)
SKY_DN