The input parameters are organized in three groups: general source-detection parameters of the task edetect_stack, parameters determining the program flow, and subtask parameters which are passed by edetect_stack to the SAS source-detection tasks when calling them.
The most relevant generic parameters of edetect_stack are
| eventsets | – | a blank-separated list of file names of event lists |
| attitudesets | – | a blank-separated list of atthkgen attitude files |
| summarysets | – | a blank-separated list of odfingest ODF summary files |
| ecf | – | (optionally) the list of energy-conversion factors to calculate valid fluxes |
| pimin, pimax | – | (optionally) list of lower and upper limits of the energy bands in eV. Will be used for each pointing-instrument combination. |
If all stages of source detection shall be performed, the first three list parameters are mandatory. The event lists should be sorted by observation IDs, i.e. eventsets='pnevents(obs1) m1events(obs1) m2events(obs1) m1events(obs2) m2events(obs2) pnevents(obs3) ...'. The appropriate attitude and summary files are chosen by edetect_stack according to their observation identifier, i.e. the OBS_ID keywords of the event lists and attitude files and the “Observation identifier” line in the summary file. The file-naming convention of all files will be described in the next subsection.
Parameters which determine the program flow start with “run” (runattcalc, runevselect, ...). Alternatively, the parameters minstage, maxstage can be used to address the program stages by index (indices shown to the left of Figure 2) or by name:
minstage and maxstage have precedence over the “run...” and “informational” parameters.
Parameters which are directly passed to another task start with a short version of the parameter name (e.g. att_imagesize, emask_withregionset, emask_regionset). Other parameters which change the behaviour of edetect_stack have a free name format (e.g. pimin, with_att_imagesize).
Default values of the parameters are the values used to produce the 3XMM catalogues where applicable. Part of them differ from the default parameter values of the individual tasks.
The energy bands are given as lower limits pimin and upper limits pimax and are the same for all instruments and pointings. Therefore, users need to specify one pimin and pimax component per energy band only, not per image (as in eboxdetect and emldetect.
The Energy conversion factors (ECFs) are used to convert the EPIC
count rates to fluxes and are given via the ecf parameter in units
of 
counts cm
/ erg; one ECF per input image, i.e. one value
per observation per instrument per energy band. edetect_stack
uses
A table of all EPIC energy conversion factors is available via the 3XMM-DR5 Catalogue User Guide at https://xmmssc.aip.de/cms/documentation/catalogue-structure/#ECFs. The 3XMM conversion factors are only valid if standard patterns (cf. http://xmmssc-www.star.le.ac.uk/Catalogue/2XMM/UserGuide_xmmcat.html#ImageCreat) are used to produce the images from pipeline event lists. edetect_stack applies the 3XMM patterns by default. More information on ECFs are available via the emldetect documentation.
