National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Einstein Software

General FITS file manipulation : The FTOOLS package, futils, provides a suite of programs that can be used to view and manipulate any of the Einstein archive files. To view the data particularly useful are the tasks fplot (to plot the data), fdump (to dump the data file content), fstruct and flcol (to get the structure and column name of the FITS files). Basic selection and column manipulation can be done using fselect (to select rows based on the result of a boolean expression), fcalc (to calculate values for new column based on arithmetic expression) and fstatistic (to compute standard statistical value on a column). Alternatively most of the operations (and more) mention above can be done using fv , the interactive FITS file viewer and editor.

High Level Data Products:

Images (HRI & IPC) There are several packages available to analyze FITS image files. The Ximage package will allow users to perform statistical analysis, source detection and various display options (contours, overlays, etc.) Fimage provides a set of general purpose image manipulation tools.

Spectra & Lightcurves (SSS & MPC) Spectra and lightcurves can be analyzed using Xspec and Xronos respectively. Xspec is a general spectral fitting program, providing a number of already made standard models. To use XSPEC with the Einstein archive files, it is necessary to extract from the archive a source and background spectrum and a response matrix.
The Einstein lightcurves can be used in any of the Xronos programs, each dedicated to a specific timing task. The IRAF/PROS software package contains X-ray spectral and timing analysis software which also may be used to analyze these data.

Low Level Data Products:

Event Lists (IPC & HRI) Packages that can be used to analyze photon event lists include Ximage, Xselect, futils, as well as the PROS package under IRAF.

Raw Data:

The SSS and MPC raw data files can be analyzed using fplot and fsumrows . Fplot will allow up to 8 rows of a column to be displayed in a "stack". Fsumrows will allow any number of rows to be summed together and written to a FITS file. Fplot can then be used to display this file.