I presented a new fast CCD stellar photometry task for
IRAF called
QDPHOT
(Quick & Dirty PHOTometry) which is designed to quickly produce good CCD
stellar photometry for applications where speed matters and every second is
important.
QDPHOT currently detects and photometers stars present in
two aligned CCD images with stellar full-width-at-half-maximum values
of 2-3 pixels.
QDPHOT
typically takes just a few seconds to analyze a single CCD of
two aligned WFPC2 observations in two filters
[e.g. 2-3 seconds on a 200MHz Sun Ultra1 workstation].
QDPHOT
is suitable for producing on-the-fly instrumental color-magnitude
diagrams at the telescope console in the few seconds between CCD readouts.
QDPHOT is also an excellent data mining tool for
finding high-quality stellar observations amongst GB of archived data.
As an example of using
QDPHOT as a data mining tool,
I presented many instrumental
color-magnitude diagrams of globular clusters in the Milky Way and nearby
galaxies which are based on archival WFPC2 observations obtained from the
Hubble Space Telescope data archive. Typical reduction times for these
WFPC2 observations was
about 8-12 seconds per cluster CMD (all 4 WFPC2 CCDs).
QDPHOT
is currently packaged as part of the IRAF QDTOOLS package
which is available at the following website:
http://www.noao.edu/staff/mighell/qdtools/
