ALLPHOT - Stellar photometry automated
======================================

ALLPHOT is a package designed to automate the ALLFRAME stellar
photometry package. 
ALLPHOT consists of fancy wrapper scripts for all ALLFRAME (DAOPHOT, DAOMATCH,
DAOMASTER, ALLFRAME, MONTAGE2) programs to be run unattended. allphot a friendly
command line interface that allows to write scripts quickly. It has
all the original command parameters, but with built-in good default
values, so the user does not have to deal with thousands arcane
tweaks. It also handle files and directories properly. It does not
touch any of the ALLFRAME source code.

ALLPHOT was originally developed with the CANFAR project to re-run
photometry on MACHO data in the hope it can be applied to other large
data sets. It is now used in other projects as well.

It can be used from other command line programs, its API is fairly
generic. The code was originally inspired by the "eselect" tool used
on Gentoo Linux, and shamefully borrows a lot of code from it, but it
diverged from it significantly. It is written in pure bash, with some
C tools to deal with FITS files (using cfitsio).

Availability
============

The current stable version is available on http://astrowww.phys.uvic.ca/~seb/
The development git is public on http://github.com/sfabbro/allphot

Installation
============

See the INSTALL file.


Documentation
=============

* All ALLPHOT commands are wrappers around the ALLFRAME commands, so it is
  very much advised to know how the original ALLFRAME commands
  work. Refer to the original DAOPHOT and ALLFRAME papers, and
  documentation included in the allframe tar ball for more details.

  Typing "allphot <command> --help" (or with no arguments), will
  describe what you can do with the particular <command>.

  All commands are straight forward and intuitive. For example, a
  typical orginal and interactive DAOPHOT FIND command would be as follow,
  assuming you have a daophot.opt file:
 
	$ cat daophot.opt
	GA=1.6
	RE=5.5

	$ daophot
	[...snip...]
	 Command: attach image.fits
	[...snip...]
	 Command: find
	[...snip...]
               Number of frames averaged, summed: 1,1
          File for positions (default image.coo): 
	[...snip...]
		      Are you happy with this? Y
	 Command: exit

  You can get exactly the same result in one line ALLPHOT command
  lines using allphot:

       $ allphot daophot find --option GA=1.6 --option RE=5.5 image.fits
       [...snip...]

* There is a very basic dictionnary generator to grab some values from a
  FITS header to help building options files. Example:

       $ cat image.dict
       GA=fits(GAIN)
       RE=fits(RDNOISE)

       $ allphot daophot option --dict=image.dict image.fits


* To get a list of available modules, just run:

       $ allphot help

* The command line for each module is shown running:

       $ allphot <module> usage

* To get a list of DAOPHOT submodules:

      $ allphot daophot list

* Modules have default arguments that you can overwrite with
  command line options.

* There are also some example scripts in the directory "examples".

* Two tools to parse FITS headers are also compiled:
    - fitshead: print a FITS header from a HDU or all of them
    - fitskey : print or modify keys of FITS headers
    - fitssatur: automatic determination of a saturation level


Contributing to ALLPHOT
=======================

If you have suggestions, bugs, or are interested in contributing in
ALLPHOT development, please send AUTHORS an email, or interact directly
with the git site at:

     http://github.com/sfabbro/allphot