This program merges the sky data from multiple files into a single file. In particular, it can take the VVV/VVVX tiles as input and combine them into a single table. The output is a fits table containing the photometrical data for non-overlapped sources, and for overlapped sources it computes a weighted average for available photometrical bands.

Just install the requirements (tested on python 3.11.5)

pip install -r requirements.txt

If you want to use a virtual environment, you can create it with

python -m venv venv

and then activate it with

source venv/bin/activate

After that install the requirements as indicated before.

For single use, run:

python main.py -f1 table1.fits -f2 table2.fits -o output.fits

To merge multiple files, use the bash script script.sh provided. It merges all the fits files inside a directory.

The image shows the VVVX tiles in Galactic coordinates (notice that the tiles overlap). In particular, tiles from 457 to 512 cover the north Galactic region of the bulge. The script in this repository merges all the tiles of this region into a single file, as shown in the image below.

Note: it took around 1 hour to merge all the tiles into a single table. It is also very RAM-consuming, so it is recommended to run it on a server with at least 64 GB of RAM for the example provided here (output file 7.8 GB).