obscure extractor bug

Under some circumstances ROTANG elements in the output region extension could have junk values but only for region types where the rotation angle is irrelevant. This is fixed in extractor v5.14.

max size of GTI arrays in extractor

At Lorella's request I increased the allowed GTI array size to 200,000. This should really be a dynamic array but that would require an extensive rewrite.

light curves with extractor

Alex requested a way of better controlling the start time of a light curve created using extractor. I've added a new parameter lcstart which sets the time of the first bin (in spacecraft time units). This is checked into the development version as extractor v5.12.

problem with extractor5.09

In the course of Suzaku pipeline testing Lorella spotted a problem I introduced during the attempted speed-up of the fixwmp routine. Pixels with non-zero counts show up even within the part of the region which is supposed to be set to -1.

The particular case of Suzaku demonstrated a conceptual issue here. Those pixels showing up within the supposed excluded region are real events. What is happening is that the region is defined in sky coordinates but the WMAP is written in detector coordinates. I calculate a conversion to determine which WMAP pixels are within the image region however it is a time-averaged solution. In the pre-5.09 version the satellite attitude wobble results in some events being incorrectly excluded from the WMAP. It was these events that the 5.09 version actually included however they are potentially confusing to users.

The fix is checked in as v5.10.

extractor bug for detector coordinate regions

Dave Henley reported problems with the new extractor when using detector coordinates for the region. This is because I wasn't correctly handling the case when the WCS type is blank. This is corrected in v5.09 which should be released as part of HEAsoft patch update next week.

extractor bug for annular regions

Phil Evans spotted a problem in the new release when using an annulus region type. The region filtering is performed correctly however the WMAP created is too small in the case when the WMAP and image coordinates are the same. This is actually an error I introduced in the cfitsio code (which is however not used internally in cfitsio so doesn't change its standard use). A work-around is to use the elliptannulus region type instead of annulus. I also have a fix within the extractor code to get around this.

This bug is important for Swift analysis.

A couple of extractor fixes

A couple of bug fixes that were too late to get into the recent release.

1. When using a GTI file for time filtering the fall-back position of looking in the first table extension for the table data was not working. This should not be a problem if the gtinam parameter was set correctly.

2. The fixwmp routine was unnecessarily slow with the new method of region filtering. It is still slow but not as slow as it was.

These fixes are in v5.07 and will appear on the HEAsoft bugs page.

minor tweak to extractor region extension output

Switched the region extension written by extractor back to the XMM convention of REG001##. This works for Chandra because CIAO looks for the HDUNAME='REGION' keyword which is also included.

Fixed bug in new extractor

Pre-release testing on the Swift pipeline showed up an embarrassing bug in extractor v5 - the BACKSCAL keyword was not written correctly. This is now fixed in v5.02.

There was also a problem writing out the ROTBOX shape in the REGION extension. Further, Swift software does not recognize ROTBOX at present so I changed this to BOX even when there is a rotation angle. This may produce problems with other missions. These changes are v5.03.

And another bug this time when writing the REGION extension in the case when the input event file already has one and further region filtering is performed by extractor. v5.04.

More minor fixes. Removed the reference to number of events rejected because they fall outside the region (which extractor can no longer no). Eliminated duplication of identical regions in the same component being written to the REGION extension. v5.05.

extractor and filenames with "+"

Kim Page at Leicester reported that the HEAsoft 6.5 version of extractor dies when using a time filter if the filename contains a "+". It was interpreting this as an HDU number. Fixed this and checked in a change which will be included in extractor v5.0.