About and credits

ELLIPROF was originally developed by John Tonry as part of MONSTA.

Maintained by Ehsan Kourkchi (Edwin Kay)
Email: ekourkchi@gmail.com

Source code and issues: https://github.com/ekourkchi/elliprof
Package: https://pypi.org/project/elliprof/

History

ELLIPROF is part of MONSTA, an astronomical image-analysis and plotting package written mostly in Fortran. MONSTA combines the Vista image-processing system and the Mongo plotting package. Within MONSTA, ELLIPROF is the command that fits elliptical isophotes to a galaxy and builds a model image from them.

The elliprof package makes ELLIPROF available outside MONSTA, as a command-line program and a Python library. The numerical code is the original, compiled unchanged. New code reads and writes FITS files, prepares the image and handles the command line. See How elliprof is built.

The original source files keep their authorship: elliprof.f, jtutil.f, gcfit.f and profile.inc by John Tonry; the Vista support files by Tod R. Lauer and Richard J. Stover. See THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

ELLIPROF has been used as the galaxy-modelling component of surface brightness fluctuation (SBF) analyses, from the I-band SBF Survey of Tonry et al. (1997) to HST studies (Jordán et al. 2004; Mei et al. 2005a; Jensen et al. 2021). In those analyses it produced the smooth galaxy model and the galaxy-subtracted image. The fluctuation measurement and the distances came from separate, downstream steps. See ELLIPROF in SBF analyses.

Licence

The elliprof package code is under the MIT License. The original ELLIPROF sources and the bundled libraries keep their own terms (see LICENSE and THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md).

Example data

The UGC 12517 image used throughout this site is an HST WFC3/IR F110W image, distributed with the repository in examples/u12517 together with its mask and the calibration from the original analysis.

Disclaimer

This software is provided as-is, without warranty of any kind. The maintainer is not responsible for software errors, incorrect scientific results, data loss, or decisions made using results produced by this software. Users are responsible for independently validating results for their scientific application.