6.1.4 Invoking Crop ¶

Crop will crop a region from an image. If in WCS mode, it will also stitch parts from separate images in the input files. The executable name is astcrop with the following general template

$ astcrop [OPTION...] [ASCIIcatalog] ASTRdata ...

One line examples:

## Crop all objects in cat.txt from image.fits:
$ astcrop --catalog=cat.txt image.fits

## Crop all options in catalog (with RA,DEC) from all the files
## ending in `_drz.fits' in `/mnt/data/COSMOS/':
$ astcrop --mode=wcs --catalog=cat.txt /mnt/data/COSMOS/*_drz.fits

## Crop the outer 10 border pixels of the input image and give
## the output HDU a name ('EXTNAME' keyword in FITS) of 'mysection'.
$ astcrop --section=10:*-10,10:*-10 --hdu=2 image.fits \
          --metaname=mysection

## Crop region around RA and Dec of (189.16704, 62.218203):
$ astcrop --mode=wcs --center=189.16704,62.218203 goodsnorth.fits

## Same crop above, but coordinates given in sexagesimal (you can
## also use ':' between the sexagesimal components).
$ astcrop --mode=wcs --center=12h36m40.08,62d13m5.53 goodsnorth.fits

## Crop region around pixel coordinate (568.342, 2091.719):
$ astcrop --mode=img --center=568.342,2091.719 --width=201 image.fits

## Crop all HDUs within a FITS file at a certain coordinate, while
## preserving the names of the HDUs in the output.
$ for hdu in $(astfits input.fits --listimagehdus); do \
    astcrop input.fits --hdu=$hdu --append --output=crop.fits \
            --metaname=$hdu --mode=wcs --center=189.16704,62.218203 \
            --width=10/3600
  done

Crop has one mandatory argument which is the input image name(s), shown above with ASTRdata .... You can use shell expansions, for example, * for this if you have lots of images in WCS mode. If the crop box centers are in a catalog, you can use the --catalog option. In other cases, you have to provide the single cropped output parameters must be given with command-line options. See Crop output for how the output file name(s) can be specified. For the full list of general options to all Gnuastro programs (including Crop), please see Common options.

Floating point numbers can be used to specify the crop region (except the --section option, see Crop section syntax). In such cases, the floating point values will be used to find the desired integer pixel indices based on the FITS standard. Hence, Crop ultimately does not do any sub-pixel cropping (in other words, it does not change pixel values). If you need such crops, you can use Warp to first warp the image to the a new pixel grid, then crop from that. For example, let’s assume you want a crop from pixels 12.982 to 80.982 along the first dimension. You should first translate the image by \(-0.482\) (note that the edge of a pixel is at integer multiples of \(0.5\)). So you should run Warp with --translate=-0.482,0 and then crop the warped image with --section=13:81.

There are two ways to define the cropped region: with its center or its vertices. See Crop modes for a full description. In the former case, Crop can check if the central region of the cropped image is indeed filled with data or is blank (see Blank pixels), and not produce any output when the center is blank, see the description under --checkcenter for more.

When in catalog mode, Crop will run in parallel unless you set --numthreads=1, see Multi-threaded operations. Note that when multiple outputs are created with threads, the outputs will not be created in the same order. This is because the threads are asynchronous and thus not started in order. This has no effect on each output, see Reddest clumps, cutouts and parallelization for a tutorial on effectively using this feature.

• Crop options
• Crop output
• Crop known issues