NAME average - cube averaging SYNOPSIS average [options] [parameters] DESCRIPTION average reduces a FITS cube over its third dimension, by applying one of several possible algorithms described below. Users should specify a cut and a method. The cut describes how planes in the input cube are grouped for averaging, the method specifies what kind of average is applied. PARAMETERS -i <incube> or --in <incube> Specifies the name of the input cube (mandatory). -o <outcube> or --out <outcube> Specifies the name of the output cube (optional). Default output name for an input cube named incube.fits is incube.avg.fits. OPTIONS Cuts Cuts specify how to group the input planes to apply the average. Default cut is --cut whole. --cut whole applies the average on the whole cube, i.e. all planes are averaged to a single one according to the requested method. --cut cycle --step <n> applies the average for every <n> planes in the input cube. For example, if the input cube contains 50 planes and this cut is specified with n=10, the planes will be averaged 10 by 10 to produce one cube in output con- taining 5 planes. --cut running --halfwidth <h> Performs a running average: the output is a cube con- taining as many planes as the input cube. Each plane is the result of an average over an interval centered on the same plane in the input, plus or minus <h> planes. This means that central planes will be the average of 2h+1 input planes, and edge planes will be an average of between h+1 and 2h+1 input planes. Example: the input cube has 6 planes, h=2. Brackets show where the central plane is at each iteration. plane 1 is built from [1] 2 3 plane 2 is built from 1 [2] 3 4 plane 3 is built from 1 2 [3] 4 5 plane 4 is built from 2 3 [4] 5 6 plane 5 is built from 3 4 [5] 6 plane 6 is built from 4 5 [6] Methods Methods specify how to perform the average. Default is linear. --method linear Performs a normal, linear average of the input planes. --method sum Same as linear, but does not divide by the number of averaged planes at the end. Useful for cubes which do not have much signal. --method median Median filtering along the z-axis. --method filtered with additional parameters --filt-low npix and --filt- high npix. This is actually an extension of the median average. A time line is extracted for each pixel posi- tion on the detector (along the z-axis), and then sorted out. The median average would only keep the cen- tral value, whereas this method requests two numbers specifying how many low and high pixels shall be rejected before making an average. FILES Input files shall all comply with FITS format. BUGS It is not yet possible to combine a running filter cut with a filtered average method.