3.5 Collating the Results

All the source properties computed by AE plus the spectral fitting results²can be collated (§7.12) into a FITS table (with $\sim$100 columns) via a command like:

    acis_extract, 'all.srclist',  COLLATED_FILENAME='all.collated', REGION_FILE='all.reg'

The resulting FITS binary table, all.collated, can of course be examined and manipulated with any of the usual FITS tools in CIAO, HEASOFT, IDL, etc.

An overview of the standard workflow for extracting a set of point sources from multiple observations is shown in Figure 8.

The observer can derive from this FITS table whatever quantities are suitable for publication in L^ATEX or machine-readable tables. For example in our own star formation studies we produce (§7.14) three machine-generated tables presenting basic source properties, thermal plasma spectral fits, and power law spectral fits; examples are shown in Figures 1, 2, and 3.

Figure 1: Example of machine-generated source properties table

Figure 2: Example of machine-generated spectroscopy table

Figure 3: Example of machine-generated spectroscopy table