2.1.4 Dataset inspection and cropping ¶

First, let’s visually inspect the datasets we downloaded in Setup and data download. Let’s take F160W image as an example. One of the most common programs for viewing FITS images is SAO DS9, which is usually called through the ds9 command-line program, like the command below. If you do not already have DS9 on your computer and the command below fails, please see SAO DS9.

$ ds9 download/hlsp_xdf_hst_wfc3ir-60mas_hudf_f160w_v1_sci.fits

By default, DS9 open a relatively small window (for modern browsers) and its default scale and color bar make it very hard to see any structure in the image: everything will look black. Also, by default, it zooms into the center of the image and you need to scroll to zoom-out and see the whole thing. To avoid these problems, Gnuastro has the astscript-fits-view script:

$ astscript-fits-view \
           download/hlsp_xdf_hst_wfc3ir-60mas_hudf_f160w_v1_sci.fits

After running this command, you will see that the DS9 window fully covers the height of your monitor, it is showing the whole image, using a more clear color-map, and many more useful things. In fact, you see the DS9 command that is used in your terminal²⁶. On GNU/Linux operating systems (like Ubuntu, and Fedora), you can also set your graphics user interface to use this script for opening FITS files when you click on them. For more, see the instructions in the checklist at the start of Invoking astscript-fits-view.

As you hover your mouse over the image, notice how the “Value” and positional fields on the top of the ds9 window get updated. The first thing you might notice is that when you hover the mouse over the regions with no data, they have a value of zero. The next thing might be that the dataset has a shallower and deeper component (see Quantifying measurement limits). Recall that this is a combined/reduced image of many exposures, and the parts that have more exposures are deeper. In particular, the exposure time of the deep inner region is more than 4 times the exposure time of the outer (more shallower) parts.

To simplify the analysis in this tutorial, we will only be working on the deep field, so let’s crop it out of the full dataset. Fortunately the XDF survey web page (above) contains the vertices of the deep flat WFC3-IR field²⁷. With Gnuastro’s Crop program, you can use those vertices to cutout this deep region from the larger image (to learn more about the Crop program see Crop). But before that, to keep things organized, let’s make a directory called flat-ir and keep the flat (single-depth) regions in that directory (with a ‘xdf-’ prefix for a shorter and easier filename).

$ mkdir flat-ir
$ astcrop --mode=wcs -h0 --output=flat-ir/xdf-f105w.fits \
          --polygon="53.187414,-27.779152 : 53.159507,-27.759633 : \
                     53.134517,-27.787144 : 53.161906,-27.807208" \
          download/hlsp_xdf_hst_wfc3ir-60mas_hudf_f105w_v1_sci.fits

$ astcrop --mode=wcs -h0 --output=flat-ir/xdf-f125w.fits \
          --polygon="53.187414,-27.779152 : 53.159507,-27.759633 : \
                     53.134517,-27.787144 : 53.161906,-27.807208" \
          download/hlsp_xdf_hst_wfc3ir-60mas_hudf_f125w_v1_sci.fits

$ astcrop --mode=wcs -h0 --output=flat-ir/xdf-f160w.fits \
          --polygon="53.187414,-27.779152 : 53.159507,-27.759633 : \
                     53.134517,-27.787144 : 53.161906,-27.807208" \
          download/hlsp_xdf_hst_wfc3ir-60mas_hudf_f160w_v1_sci.fits

Run the command below to have a look at the cropped images:

$ astscript-fits-view flat-ir/*.fits

You only see the deep region now, does not the noise look much cleaner? An important result of this crop is that regions with no data now have a NaN (Not-a-Number, or a blank value) value. Any self-respecting statistical program will ignore NaN values, so they will not affect your outputs. For example, notice how changing the DS9 color bar will not affect the NaN pixels (their colors will not change).

However, do you remember that in the downloaded files, such regions had a value of zero? That is a big problem! Because zero is a number, and is thus meaningful, especially when you later want to NoiseChisel to detect²⁸ all the signal from the deep universe in this image. Generally, when you want to ignore some pixels in a dataset, and avoid higher-level ambiguities or complications, it is always best to give them blank values (not zero, or some other absurdly large or small number). Gnuastro has the Arithmetic program for such cases, and we will introduce it later in this tutorial.

In the example above, the polygon vertices are in degrees, but you can also replace them with sexagesimal²⁹ coordinates (for example, using 03h32m44.9794 or 03:32:44.9794 instead of 53.187414, the first RA, and -27d46m44.9472 or -27:46:44.9472 instead of -27.779152, the first Dec). To further simplify things, you can even define your polygon visually as a DS9 “region”, save it as a “region file” and give that file to crop. But we need to continue, so if you are interested to learn more, see Crop.

Before closing this section, let’s just take a look at the three cropping commands we ran above. The only thing varying in the three commands the filter name! Note how everything else is the same! In such cases, you should generally avoid repeating a command manually, it is prone to many bugs, and as you see, it is very hard to read (did not you suddenly write a 7 as an 8?).

To simplify the command, and allow you to work on more filters, we can use the shell’s for loop as shown below. Notice how the place where the filter names (f105w, f125w and f160w) are used above, have been replaced with $f (the shell variable that for will update in every loop) below.

$ rm flat-ir/*.fits
$ for f in f105w f125w f160w; do \
    astcrop --mode=wcs -h0 --output=flat-ir/xdf-$f.fits \
            --polygon="53.187414,-27.779152 : 53.159507,-27.759633 : \
                       53.134517,-27.787144 : 53.161906,-27.807208" \
            download/hlsp_xdf_hst_wfc3ir-60mas_hudf_"$f"_v1_sci.fits; \
  done