Sextractor

Sextractor is an object detection program by Emmanuel Bertin. Obtained from http://www.astromatic.net/software/sextractor On 8/7/2014 I installed version 2.19.5 compiled from source, it is the version found in /usr/local/bin/sex

Usage

sex image.fits -c default.sex

Before running sextractor, you need three files:

default.sex - the config file mentioned above
default.param - uncomment which parameters you want sextractor to output
default.conv - a convolution mask...

By default the output will be in a file called test.cat configurable in default.sex.

These files must be in the same folder as your fits image unless you
specify absolute paths. Get them with these commands:

cp /usr/local/sextractor-2.19.5/config/default.sex .
cp /usr/local/sextractor-2.19.5/config/default.param .
cp /usr/local/sextractor-2.19.5/config/default.conv .

You may also need:
cp /usr/local/sextractor-2.19.5/config/default.nnw .

gotchas

The latest version of sextractor requires liblapack.so and libblas.so amongst others, so if your machine moans about missing libraries. Contact your system amanager.

Documentation

Sextractor for Dummies as well as the official sextractor manual.

Rhys Morris

Last modified: Wed Jul 9 15:29:25 GMT 2014