A-PHOT is a new code developed by E. Merlin to perform aperture photometry on astronomical images, particularly well suited for multi-band extra-galactic surveys.
A-PHOT estimates the fluxes emitted by astronomical objects within any chosen set of circular or elliptical apertures. Unlike other widely used codes, it runs on pre-defined lists of positions, allowing for repeated measurements on the same list of objects on different images. This can be useful when forced photometric measurements on a given position are needed.
A-PHOT can estimate morphological parameters (size, ellipticity, position angle and Kron radius of the sources). It can also compute a local background flux, and on-the-fly individual optimized elliptical apertures, in which the signal-to-noise ratio is maximized. Clipping, flagging and symmetric replacing of bad pixels are optionally possible.
A-PHOT proves to a useful and versatile tool to quickly extract robust and accurate photometric measurements and basic morphological information of galaxies and stars, with the advantage of allowing for various measurements of fluxes at any chosen position without the need of a full detection run, and to determine the basic morphological features of the sources.
The code is presented in Merlin et al. 2019 2019A&A…622A.169M. Please cite this paper if you use A-PHOT for your science!
You can download the source code here.
Please contact emiliano.merlin@inaf.it for any question / problem / bug / suggestion. Thanks!