Problems while running BMEP

I'm clicking and dragging my mouse, but the profile isn't updating

Is the horizontal line red or green? If its red, you are still in extraction mode, and the plot will update when you hit "q" while the IDL window is selected. You might want to reset the profile ("r").

I'm hitting "m" but it isn't even fitting at all!

Is the horizontal line red or green? If its green, you are still in profile mode, and you cannot fit profiles until you go into extraction mode by hitting the "b" key with the image as the active window. If that isn't the problem, what is the fit status? This is the same status as output from MPFIT, so you can tell what the problem is. You might need to change the width considered for the fit by hitting M.

I have this very bad profile, but "m" doesn't seem to fit at all! It just keeps failing.

Well, you don't have to do a fit to extract an object. You can hit "n" and the program will place an object where your mouse is with some default width to extract.

I can't read these dang tiny plot letters

Try !p.charsize=2.5 in IDL before running BMEP.

I like the profile fit, but my error bars seem too small (or big). Whats happening?

I don't know. This could be a slew of different things. Check out the page on [Testing data] to run some checks on things.

I accidentally started the program and I want to bail without opening any images. How?

Just put -1 instead of an actual number of an object or mask. Or put a number larger than any option. This works for things in general (such as the wavelength fitting)

I'm clicking on a mask, but nothing in the plot is changing

Try restarting IDL. Sometimes it just bugs out and becomes unresponsive. There isn't anything in the code that is hanging, I think. Its just IDL being IDL.

I zoomed in and can't zoom out. Help.

hit x twice in a row without moving the mouse. Or move to the left after initially hitting x.

I don't want to fit the profile to a gaussian

Hit P then when it asks "fit p to a gaussian? (set to:1) (type 1 or 0)" type in 0 and hit enter.

Does the blind extraction program overwrite the spectra extracted by hand?

No. In fact, the "by hand" spectra must remain in the 1D output folder so that the blind program can find the serendip objects to extract.

The white line seems to be there for some slits, but not others (in the 2D images).

Is your monitor width smaller than the width of the images? If so, I've known about this issue where sometimes the line doesn't show up. This is because IDL uses nearest-neighbor interpolation when images are shrunk. They are shrunk to fit the resolution of your monitor, usually. One workaround is that the expected object position should appear as a vertical green line in the profile, so if you click and drag across any spot on your image, the profile will appear and the expected location will be marked. Then you can reset the profile (by pressing "r" while the image is the active window) and try and figure it out from there.

The scaling in the images is weird. Is there any way I can re-scale them, like right clicking and moving the mouse in DS9.

There are two keywords in bmep, botpercent (default 10) and toppercent (default 90). Adjust these to get a slightly different view of your image. Basically all of the values in an image are sorted and the image is scaled linearly between two values. These two values are the minimum and maximum values in the image if you exclude the top 100-toppercent values and the bottom botpercent values.