MUSELET

_images/muselet_logo.jpg

Description

MUSELET (for MUSE Line Emission Tracker) is a simple SExtractor-based python tool to detect emission lines in a datacube. It has been developed by Johan Richard (johan.richard@univ-lyon1.fr), with help from Johany Martinez (CRAL) and Laure Piqueras (CRAL).

MUSELET uses SExtractor (Bertin & Arnouts 1996, http://www.astromatic.net/software/sextractor) to detect line emission in narrow-band images created from the cube. It then merges all detections in a single catalog, separating the emission lines linked with continuum sources detected in the white light images from the isolated emission lines. It then tries to estimate the redshift from multiple emission lines.

MUSELET takes as an input a MUSE DATACUBE (fits format), and works in 3 steps:

  • STEP 1: creation of white light, color and narrow band images.

    MUSELET will first create a variance-weighted white light image as well as R,G,B images based on 1/3 of the wavelength range each. The code will then go through the wavelength axis and create one narrow band image at each wavelength plane. The narrow band image is based on a line-weighted (spectrally) average of 5 wavelength planes in the cube (so 5x1.25 Angstroms wide). The continuum is estimated from 2 spectral medians of ~ 25 Angstroms each on the blue and red side of the narrow band region. The size of the continuum region can be adjusted with the optional parameter delta (in number of wavelength planes, default=20).

    These narrow band images are created in the nb/ directory. If not present it will be created.

  • STEP 2: MUSELET will run SExtractor using the default.sex, default.param, default.conv and default.nnw parameter files in the current and nb/ directory. If not present default parameter files are created.

  • STEP 3: The code will merge all SExtractor catalogs and will return separate emission lines linked with continuum objects from the rest. For each of these catalog, MUSELET will estimate a redshift based on multiple emission lines. Emission lines are merged spatially to the same source based on the “radius” parameter (in pixels, default radius=4). The redshifts are estimated from emission line catalogs emlines (all emission lines) and emlines_small (list of brightest emission lines). These files are 2 columns (name and wavelength) and can be adjusted to one’s needs.

The code will produce:

Requirements:

  • MPDAF (v 1.1.17)
  • SExtractor (“sex” binary file in your $PATH).

Tutorials

MUSELET is run through the following commands in MPDAF:

>>> from mpdaf.sdetect import muselet
>>> cont, sing, raw = muselet('DATACUBE.fits')

Optionally, one can provide the starting step (2 or 3) in order to only redo one part of the script:

>>> cont, sing, raw = muselet('DATACUBE.fits',step=2) #will assume the narrow-band images are already created

Optionally, one can provide the size of the continuum region to subtract on each side of the narrow-band images:

>>> cont, sing, raw = muselet('DATACUBE.fits',delta=15) #only 15 wavelength planes in continuum estimate

The method mpdaf.sdetect.SourceList.write could be used to save all sources and the corresponding catalog as FITS files:

>>> cont.write(path='cont', fmt='working')

Is is also possible to create a mpdaf.sdetect.Catalog object and save it as an ascii file:

>>> from mpdaf.sdetect import Catalog
>>> cat = Catalog.from_sources(cont, fmt='working')
>>> cat.write('continuum_lines_z.cat', format='ascii')

Finally it is possible to interact easily in topcat between the muselet catalog and a MUSE datacube opened in ds9. To do so one has to select the “Activation Action” menu and put the following custom code:

>>> exec("topcat_show_ds9",toString(RA),toString(DEC),toString(LBDA_OBS001))
_images/topcat_muselet_catalogs.png

The shell script topcat_show_ds9 (inspired by Benjamin Clement) is installed with MPDAF and should be in your path.