National Aeronautics and Space Administration

ascii2flc is a Perl script


This script creates a lightcurve FITS file, suitable for XRONOS, from
an ASCII format file by calling the FTOOL task fcreate. Different
types of FITS lightcurve format can be created depending on the number
of columns available in the ASCII file.

The input file is a free-format ASCII file. Each line of data
corresponds to one row in the FITS table and should contain values for
every column. Any line whose first non-whitespace character is not a
digit will be treated as a comment. The script asks for the column
number (in the ASCII file) of the following quantities: Time, Rate (or
Counts), Errors and Fractional Exposure. Not all of them need to be
present, only the Rate (or Count) with the Error (in the case of Count
only if different from sqrt(Count)) columns are required. If the time
column is not present, the input timing header keywords (see later)
are sufficient for XRONOS to reconstruct the time for each bin. NOTE
that undefined values in the data file (es. data gap) should be marked
with  "INDEF".

The script also asks for the following parameters: TIMEUNIT, TSTART,
TSTOP, TIMEDEL and TIMEZERO. Those are the minimum required header
keywords for the FITS lightcurve output. All the keywords shoud be
entered in the same unit either days ('d') or seconds ('s'). The unit
value is the input for TIMEUNIT parameter. TSTART and TSTOP define the
start and stop of the lightcurve and TIMEDEL the integration time. If
the TIME column is not present in the ASCII, the script prompts for
TIMEZERO which is a reference value, used within XRONOS to calculate
the nth bin time. See also fcreate help.


  -h               See this message.

  -i infile[ext]   Name of the input ASCII data file.

  -o outfile       Output file FITS file name.

  -d               Debug mode.  Doesn't delete temporary files on exit.