Description

assign_wcs associates a WCS object with each science exposure. The WCS object transforms positions in the detector frame to positions in a world coordinate frame - ICRS and wavelength. In general there may be intermediate coordinate frames depending on the instrument. The WCS is saved in the ASDF extension of the FITS file. It can be accessed as an attribute of the meta object when the fits file is opened as a data model.

Currently IRIS implements a very simple model that expects standard FITS WCS keywords in the header and uses astropy.modeling to build a transformation pipeline, wrap it into a gwcs.WCS object and store it as output_model.meta.wcs, as it is expected by Level 3 pipelines.

The forward direction of the transforms is from detector to world coordinates and the input positions are 0-based.

assign_wcs expects to find the basic WCS keywords in the SCI header. Distortion and spectral models are not implemented yet and will be stored in reference files in the ASDF format.

Example

See an example script to process a file with FITS WCS keywords in the header:

import liger_iris_pipeline
import astropy.units as u

liger_iris_pipeline.monkeypatch_jwst_datamodels()

input_filename ="iris_sim_gc_filterKN3_fix.fits"
output = liger_iris_pipeline.assign_wcs.AssignWcsStep.call(input_filename)
print(output.meta.wcs([0,4096]*u.pix,[0,4096]*u.pix))