IPP Software Navigation Tools IPP Links Communication Pan-STARRS Links

Opened 19 years ago

Closed 18 years ago

#867 closed defect (needinfo)

Bad PSF fits are not diagnosed

Reported by: rhl@… Owned by: eugene
Priority: high Milestone:
Component: psphot Version: 1.0
Severity: major Keywords:
Cc:

Description

In the SDSS u band (and maybe PS y?) it is not uncommon for there to be very
few PSF stars. The spatial variation code in psphot doesn't take this into
account.

In particular, if I ask for linear spatial variation (3 coefficients; 1, x, y)
with only 3 PSF stars the following occurs:

1/ The linear fit is performed
2/ The mean and standard deviation are estimated.
3/ All but one star is clipped out (as the s.d. is 0)
4/ The Gauss-Jordan fitter fails to notice that the normal equations
are singular
5/ psphot attempts to estimate the PSF at some position in the frame,
and the q1 > 0 assertion in the QGAUSS code fails as the estimated
SXX and SYY are naturally crazy

There are two things here (in addition to the singular matrix not being
detected which I have reported separately):

1/ The code needs to be smarter about such error conditions
2/ There needs to be some way to test the quality of the fit without
failing an assertion. The test code in pmPSTtry.c predicated on
psTraceGetLevel("psModules.objects") >= 4 causes an abort.

This bug might be better moved to psModules as that's where the code is,
but I've already entered this PR and I can't move it.

Change History (2)

comment:1 by eugene, 19 years ago

op_sys: MacOS XAll
Status: newassigned

comment:2 by jhoblitt, 18 years ago

Cc: jhoblitt@… added
Resolution: needinfo
Status: assignedclosed

Is this still valid?

Note: See TracTickets for help on using tickets.