An overview

ESP (Extended Surface Photometry) is a package of application programs developed to allow you to determine the photometric properties of galaxies and other extended objects. It has applications that:

• Detect/identify flatfielding faults - SKEW
• Remove cosmic ray events - TOPPED
• Median filter images on a defined scale - FASTMED
• Determine whole image statistics including: median count, modal count, kurtosis and skewness - HISTPEAK
• Determine the local background value on a number of different parts of an image - LOBACK
• Perform galaxy profiling using intensity analysis - ELLPRO
• Perform galaxy profiling using contour analysis - ELLFOU
• Perform 2-D Gaussian profiling of sources - GAUFIT
• Generate pie slice cross-sections of sources - SECTOR
• Display graphs showing the profiling/cross-section results - GRAPHS
• Help detect faint diffuse objects in an image - SELFC/SELFCW/CORR

ESP processes images stored as NDFs, and therefore you can use it in conjunction with other packages like; KAPPA, CCDPACK, Figaro, PHOTOM, JCMTDR and PISA.

It allows you to define areas to exclude in the analysis using keyword descriptions in text ARD files.

There is now an interface to ESP within GAIA. This supports all the ESP applications except GRAPHS and HISTPEAK: GRAPHS is purely concerned with the display of ESP output, and all the non-graphical functionality of HISTPEAK is provided by the support for HSUB.

The ESP web page is at http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/star/esp/