Ellipse - Memory has been Corrupted

katie7 wrote on Aug 12, 2009

Hi,

I am using ellipse (from stsdas) in the interactive mode with SAOimage ds9. When ellipse cannot automatically find the centroid of the object, ellipse prompts for an approximate guess. When I give ellipse this guess, it proceeds to think for awhile, and then gives back the error message:

Memory has been Corrupted.

It appears when I run this in non-interactive mode, this problem does not occur.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Katie

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Mike Fitzpatrick wrote on Aug 12, 2009

A 'memory corrupted' error is normally a coding error (e.g. an array overflow), but it can be triggered by anything from data values to specific combinations of parameters. Without your image and a list of the parameters (and the IRAF and OS versions) to reproduce the problem any comments are pure speculation.

The fact the task seems to 'think' for a little while makes me think the fit might not be converging for some reason and the task eventually dies. You might try resetting some of the 'controlpar' parameters to change the fit behavior, or perhaps try a (slightly) different guess for the centroid to see if the behavior changes. Otherwise, if you're running an older version of STSDAS you might try getting the latest.

If you don't get an answer here, the STScI help desk can be reached at help@stsci.edu Hope this helps.

-Mike

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Last post on Aug 12, 2009