The benefit of borrowing my dad’s electric car to head down to New Hampshire for a few days is that I have four hour chunks of time while it charges to find a coffee shop and get some work done!

Directory Structure

I spent quite a while unloading all of the flc, flt, drc, and drz images from the individual folders they were saved in. I then added the drc and flc files to a folder together where I grouped them according to the beginnings of their names which I believe define the groups of flc images drizzled together to create the drc image. The names seem to go something like ib2o02020_drc.fits for the drc file then the flc files are similar until after the second 2 in the name (in this case), so the associated flc files would have names like ib2o02tbq_flc.fits.

Except for my files which begin with ib2o06(which have only one drc and one flc) all groups have one drc associated with five flc files. I can edit the make_dolparam.py file to change which group of files I want to perform photometry on so this method requires that I run pydolphot for each folder (13 total).

When I run make_dolparam.py I still get an error on wfc3mask on my drc files. I have seen Thom writing about whether or not wfc3mask is even necessary for drc files, but pydolphot executes it for them, so I am not sure. Either way, WFC3mask fails when I run it so the program proceeds with unmasked drc files, which then split incorrectly into 4 chips.

The whole idea of splitting a drc file into chips is absurd because drcs are compspite images made by overlaying several images with slightly different pointings into one larger image, so they really can’t be divided into chips. In the pydolphot readme, the drc file is shown having been “split” into one chip, there is no chip2-chip4 like I have been getting out of it. I recognize this is an issue I have to deal with, but am not sure what I can do now.l

Running Dolphot, Finally

I am working on running the actual photometric part of dolphot now, as the parameter file is working good enough for me for now. I run the dolphot commands, and some new files pop up in the working directory. I am not sure how to open them however, so I am going to do some looking and see if I can figure it out.