# Description¶

## Overview¶

This step creates image catalogs of point-like sources whose centroids are then used to compute corrections to the WCS of the input images such that sky catalogs obtained from the image catalogs using the corrected WCS will align on the sky.

## Source Detection¶

Stars are detected in the image using the Photutils “daofind” function. Photutils.daofind is an implementation of the DAOFIND algorithm (Stetson 1987, PASP 99, 191). It searches images for local density maxima that have a peak amplitude greater than a specified threshold (the threshold is applied to a convolved image) and have a size and shape similar to a defined 2D Gaussian kernel. Photutils.daofind also provides an estimate of the objects roundness and sharpness, whose lower and upper bounds can be specified.

## Alignment¶

The source catalogs for each input image are compared to each other and linear (affine) coordinate transformations that align these catalogs are derived.

## WCS Correction¶

The linear coordinate transformation computed in the previous step is used to define tangent-plane corrections that need to be applied to the GWCS pipeline in order to correct input image WCS. This correction is implemented by inserting a v2v3corr frame with tangent plane corrections into the GWCS pipeline of the image’s WCS.

## Step Arguments¶

The tweakreg step has the following optional arguments:

Source finding parameters:

• save_catalogs: A boolean indicating whether or not the catalogs should be written out. (Default=False)

• catalog_format: A str indicating catalog output file format. (Default=’ecsv’)

• kernel_fwhm: A float value indicating the Gaussian kernel FWHM in pixels. (Default=2.5)

• snr_threshold: A float value indicating SNR threshold above the background. (Default=5.0)

• brightest: A positive int value indicating the number of brightest objects to keep. (Default=100)

• peakmax: A float value used to filter out objects with pixel values >= peakmax. (Default=None)

Optimize alignment order:

• enforce_user_order: a boolean value indicating whether or not take the first image as a reference image and then align the rest of the images to that reference image in the order in which input images have been provided or to optimize order in which images are aligned. (Default=False)

Reference Catalog parameters:

• expand_refcat: A boolean indicating whether or not to expand reference catalog with new sources from other input images that have been already aligned to the reference image. (Default=False)

Object matching parameters:

• minobj: A positive int indicating minimum number of objects acceptable for matching. (Default=15)

• searchrad: A float indicating the search radius in arcsec for a match. (Default=1.0)

• use2dhist: A boolean indicating whether to use 2D histogram to find initial offset. (Default=True)

• separation: Minimum object separation in arcsec. (Default=0.5)

• tolerance: Matching tolerance for xyxymatch in arcsec. (Default=1.0)

• xoffset: Initial guess for X offset in arcsec. (Default=0.0)

• yoffset: Initial guess for Y offset in arcsec. (Default=0.0)

Catalog fitting parameters:

• fitgeometry: A str value indicating the type of affine transformation to be considered when fitting catalogs. Allowed values: {'shift', 'rscale', 'general'}. (Default=”general”)

• nclip: A non-negative integer number of clipping iterations to use in the fit. (Default = 3)

• sigma: A positive float indicating the clipping limit, in sigma units, used when performing fit. (Default=3.0)

## Further Documentation¶

The underlying algorithms are described in more detail at