Find field


A small utility for CGPS (Canadian Galactic Plane Survey - 
http://www.ras.ucalgary.ca/CGPS) users. Its purpose is to
find the best mosaic field for given coordinates
(galactic, equatorial B1950 or J2000) of an object
and a square subcube size {dX,dX,dV}, where dX and dV
can be either in physical (dgr,km/s), or pixel units.
It also tries to extract the subcube using the program 
subfits (included into the package).

The program can be very useful for users like me working
with big number of objects (search for HI shells around
O, B, WR stars, HII regions etc.)

The package is TARred, and GZIPped. It contains the
following files:

Find.field/README.find_field            (this file)
Find.field/Makefile                     (in case you need to recompile the package)
Find.field/fields                       (database of CGPS fields parameters)
Find.field/fields.old                   (database for older CGPS releases)
Find.field/run                          (script to run the code)
Find.field/src/find_field.f             (Fortran source code)
Find.field/Linux/find_field          \  (Linux x86
Find.field/Linux/subfits             /   binaries)
Find.field/SunOS/find_field          \  (Solaris Sun
Find.field/SunOS/subfits             /   binaries)
Find.field/lib/libfitsio_linux.a        (Linux x86 FITSIO library)
Find.field/lib/libfitsio_sun.a          (Solaris Sun FITSIO library)


To compile (in case you've made changes to find_field.f program):

cd Find.field
make

This works for SunOS and Linux (x86).


Before running the code, you have to check consistency
of the file fields with your collection of CGPS mosaics,
mainly the column "file"  - it should contain correct names
of HI datacubes (the names can vary depending on a release).
You might wish also to add new mosaics when they become
available - just copy the basic information from the
FITS file header. (Attention!!! - Units for CRVAL3 and CDELT3
in the fields are km/s, and not the original m/s from the FITS files
headers). (A comment: HI mosaic file name should contain a full path 
from the CDROM mounting point. If the name contains "/" or any 
other special symbols, it should be enclosed in quotes.)
File fields.old contains information about older (preliminary) 
releases which have already been replaced by final releases.

To run the code, type 

   cd Find.field
   ./run name_of_subcube_file.fits

Current limitations of the code:

  - Only square boxes (dX=dY);
  - Only |CDELT1| = |CDELT2| fields (the rest are ignored);
  - Mosaics should be in the galactic frame of reference;
  - Only cases when the box is completely within the field boundaries.
    (Which also means that if the spatial box size is > 224 pix., then
     there's a chance that a good field won't be found - even if the area
     is fully covered by the CGPS. Future versions will try to do the
     job by cutting subcubes from adjacent mosaics (up to 4), and then
     gluing them together.)

The package has been tested with Linux Red Hat 7.1, and Sun Solaris 2.8.


Author: Sergey Mashchenko (syam@astro.umontreal.ca, or Mashchenko@excite.com).
The package can be obtained from http://www.astro.umontreal.ca/~syam/software.html.

I am not responsible for any damage caused by the use of this software.

Original version: October 13, 2000
Last update: April 11, 2002