MOPEX Online Manual

Introduction

MOPEX (Mosaicking and Point Source Extraction) is a package developed at the Spitzer Science Center for astronomical image processing. MOPEX requires images in FITS format. As an example, if a user has basic calibrated FITS images from the Spitzer archive, MOPEX could be used to level the backgrounds of the input images, co-add them together to produce a mosaic with optional rejection of outliers (e.g. cosmic rays), and perform point source extraction on the detected sources.

MOPEX can be run in two ways - either from the command line, or using the Graphical User Interface (GUI). The GUI is more user-friendly, especially for first-time users, but the command line contains some additional functionality that has not yet been implemented in the GUI.

These online help pages describe the software in full, but focus on running MOPEX on the command line. Full instructions on how to run MOPEX from the GUI are included in the GUI Help system.

User Interface

The MOPEX GUI and the command-line version are packaged and released together, and all updates to both versions are done through the GUI. Both versions use the same set of C++ and C programs to carry out the data reduction. New users may wish to start with the GUI as it provides a nice visualization of each processing step and its output, and has useful image display tools. Users may want to progress to the command-line version for large batch jobs in order to script their data reduction, take advantage of the slightly faster processing time, or to use some of the additional functionality not yet available through the GUI.

Getting Help

If you have any questions about MOPEX then you can get help by emailing us at the Spitzer Helpdesk. Please let us know what operating platform you are running (MacOSX/Linux/Solaris), as much information about the problem as possible, any error messages you saw, the AOR key of your data (if using Spitzer data) and a copy of the namelist you are using. If you are using the GUI then please also include the most recent log file, which can be found in the directory ~/.spot. We endeavor to reply to all queries within 48 hours.