Mice and masks

I'm currently running GALFIT on HST f606W Mice galaxies image, trying to find point sources within the nucleii, decompose them into structural elements, find bulge shapes, etc. GALFIT is only as smart as its input, so I'm still preparing.

I masked other sources, spurious objects, trails using SeXtractor (it's a pain to compile it from source). However, it's way better to fit only a single galaxy at a time, hence I had to create mask images for them separately.

Doing it the sensible way failed, as the C script would segfault or produce a blank file -- it's probably has to do with ds9 output, but I didn't want to dive into it. Instead, I wrote a simple Python script to mask out rectangular regions around each galaxy.

More elaborate shapes could be made by reusing this script, for instance. When exporting region vertices with ds9, take care to use image coordinates instead of physical, otherwise your mask will look wonky. Here are the Mice galaxies in all their false-colour glory, the image I use for science and one of the final masks.

And here goes the essence of that Python script, it's trivial:

maskA = np.zeros((image.shape[0], image.shape[1]))

y = np.zeros(4)
x = np.zeros(4)

for i in range(0, 4):
  y[i], x[i] = poly[i]


for i in range(image.shape[0]):
  for j in range(image.shape[1]):
    if (min(y) < i and i < max(y)) and (min(x) < j and j < max(x)):
      maskA[i,j] = 1

poly is a list of (x, y) tuples. Now that I think about it, there's an option in GALFIT to fit only a section of an image -- but masking out seems to be more appropriate, as the galaxies are really close together.