The user can specify an arbitrary combination of images from different energy bands and different EPIC instruments. All images must have identical binning and WCS keywords. Up to three instruments (MOS1, MOS2, PN) with up to six images in different energy bands can be processed simultaneously (but beware of the memory limitations of your machine). Users are encouraged not to use more than five energy bands.
The detection tasks eexpmap, eboxdetect, and emldetect require the energy boundaries of the input images as input parameters pimin and pimax. edetect_chain checks whether the number of input values for pimin and pimax matches the number input images. Otherwise edetect_chain will be terminated with an error. Details on the individual tasks are given in their respective documentations.
The most important parameters of the detection tasks are accepted as input parameters by edetect_chain and passed on to the tasks. Nevertheless edetect_chain can be run with a relatively small set of mandatory parameters, leaving the parameters of the constituent tasks at their default values.
If the exposure maps have already been created in an earlier run of edetect_chain (or the PPS produced exposures maps have been renamed to the edetect_chain standard file names), the calculation of exposure maps can be omitted by setting witheexpmap=”no”.
If the event lists corresponding to the images are not available, a dummy EPIC file (e.g. the image itself) can be given as parameter eventsets. This will lead to a less accurate calculation of the exposure maps.
