Pinpoint / Sextractor question

[Arthur Sweeney]

Hello,

I want to use the sextractor option in pinpoint. I'm using scripting to set everything up and need to get a number of unique parameters from the sextractor output catalog.

My problem is that I need to get a catalog name for each object if it is available (eg gsc 2345:1234). I can get the catalog/matched star ID's from the pinpoint script facility, and the additional analysis parameter from the sextractor output catalog--Is there a simple way to tie an object in the sextractor output catalog to a GSC catalog ID other than doing a search for the nearest catalog star with a given RA,DEC?

Pinpoint requires the flags to be output in the catalog file. Why does it do this if they are not available as a pinpoint property?

Thanks

Arthur Sweeney

[Bob Denny]

Arthur --

For background, look at the PinPoint Reference, Scripting, Plate object, Plate.UseSExtractor property.

As far as I know SExtractor in its pure form does not do any catalog lookups. At least the one I ported to WIndows has no catalog I/O (and for which catalogs anyway?). It is a source extraction program period. I don't know what "the additional analysis parameter" or the "flags" are so I can't completely answer this.

Is there a simple way to tie an object in the sextractor output catalog to a GSC catalog ID other than doing a search for the nearest catalog star with a given RA,DEC?

I'm not sure what "simple" means, but your proposal to use NearestStar is how I would do it, using PinPoint to do the catalog I/O and (assuming the plate is solved) getting the X-Y to RA-Dec then feeding that into NearestStar, getting that PlateStar and using its IDentification.. PP will read in all of the cat stars in the image area, so this should be pretty fast.