FITS cubes with darkcombine

Frank Valdes wrote on Feb 12, 2002

Hi Octavi,

I'm sorry for the late response.  We do get the ADASS newsgroup/mail list
messages but we are less organized about responses than mail sent to
iraf@noao.edu.

> probably this is not a new question:
> 
> Is it possible to run noao.imred.ccdred.darkcombine with a FITS cube as
> input dark frames, instead the traditional list of separated dark images
> to combine?
> 
> Which syntax should I follow?

The thing to understand is that DARKCOMBINE is a simple script intended for
the most common operations.  It calls CCDPROC if the data needs to be
processed before combining and COMBINE to do the actual combining.  While
CCDPROC does not easily work on a cube, the COMBINE task is well suited
for what you want to do.  So if you want to take a cube of dark exposures
and make a master combined dark then use COMBINE with the "project" option.
This option in the COMBINE tasks, also in IMCOMBINE, combines pixels
across the highest dimension.  So for a 3D cube each 2D plane of the
cube is treated as an image and the combined result (using all the
other options such as rejection, scaling, etc) produces a 2D image.  So
I think the answer to your questions is that you just need to use COMBINE
with project=yes.

Yours,
Frank Valdes

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Last post on Feb 12, 2002