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Point sources

The processing sequence for performing a spectral fit on a point source (once the data files have been converted) is as follows.

  1. Create an image of the whole field using XSORT
    ICL> XSORT  SRCFILE=CYGX1_IMAGE
    
  2. Display the image using the 'I' routines.
    ICL> ILOAD  CYGX1_IMAGE
    ICL> IDISPLAY
    
  3. Choose source and background box centres and sizes
    ICL> XRTBCKBOX
    \begin{quote}\begin{verbatim}
     
    This will allow you to use a cursor on the image to select
    the position and radius of a source and background box.
    It then sorts events from within these boxes into a source
    and background spectrum.
     
    \item Background subtract the source file
     
    \begin{quote}\begin{verbatim}
    ICL> XRTSUB
    \begin{quote}\begin{verbatim}
     
    This corrects the background spectrum to that which would have
    been seen had this background been at the position of the source
    box. It then subtracts it from the source spectrum.
     
    NB: the correction of the background spectrum to the source
    position is a vignetting correction which is performed on a
    pulse height channel basis. In reality vignetting corrections
    are only calibrated for photon energies. So a small third order
    error is introduced by assuming that we know the "energy" of
    each corrected pulse height bin.
     
    \item Correct the subtracted spectrum
     
    \begin{quote}\begin{verbatim}
    ICL> XRTCORR
    
    This will correct the spectrum for the energy independent effects, dead time and wires. In addition it produces an array of energy dependent correction factors within the datafile. These are used as the effective area at each energy for this datafile.
  4. Produce a detector response matrix
    ICL> XRTRESP
    
    This multiplies the detector matrix file with the energy corrections array found in the corrected datafile. The resultant energy response structure is stored in the datafile.

  5. Set up a spectral model and fit the data
    ICL> SMODEL
    ICL> SFIT
    


Web Master
Tue Oct 7 10:18:50 BST 1997