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Comment: Migrated to Confluence 4.0

I have been observing some issues with the data we get from the FSSC. This started taking place after the FSSC implemented the weekly boundaries in the ft1 files.
The aperture photometry light curve below is for Vela and it shows some really strange behavior in the last 3 weeks or so:

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  1. Run gtselect with time selection and NO selection on photon class then run fselect to select diffuse class photons
No Format

gtselect infile=../list outfile=stepone_gtselect_allclasses_timeselection.fits ra=0.0 dec=0.0
rad=180.0 tmin=306288800 tmax= 309315444 emin=10.0 emax=1e7 zmax=180.0
fselect infile=stepone_gtselect_allclasses_timeselection.fits outfile=stepone_gtselect_allclasses_timeselection_fselect_EVENT_CLASS_3.fits
expr="(EVENT_CLASS==3)" clobber=yes
  1. Run gtselect with NO time selection and NO selection on photon class then run fselect to select diffuse class photons
No Format

gtselect infile=../list outfile=steptwo_gtselect_allclasses_notimeselection.fits ra=0.0 dec=0.0
 rad=180.0 tmin=INDEF tmax=INDEF emin=10.0 emax=1e7 zmax=180.0
fselect infile=steptwo_gtselect_allclasses_notimeselection.fits outfile=steptwo_gtselect_allclasses_notimeselection_fselect_EVENT_CLASS_3.fits expr="(EVENT_CLA
SS==3)" clobber=yes=180.0 
  1. Run gtselect with time selection and selection on photon class 
No Format

gtselect infile=../list outfile=stepthree_gtselect_evclsmin_3_timeselection.fits ra=0.0 dec=0.0 rad=180.0 tmin=306288800 tmax= 309315444 emin=10.0 emax
=1e7 zmax=180.0 evclsmin=3
  1. Run gtselect with NO time selection but with selection on photon class
No Format

 gtselect infile=../list outfile=stepfour_gtselect_evclsmin_3_notimeselection.fits ra=0.0 dec=0.0 rad=180.0 tmin=INDEF tmax=INDEF emin=10.0 emax=1e7 zma
x=180.0 evclsmin=3

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I use a python script I wrote to download and merge the data every night. I have used this script for more than a year and never so problems
and have not updated it recently so my first guess was that there is something wrong with the data I am getting from the FSSC. To exclude
this possibility I decided to generate a merged ft1 file using different methods. These methods are described in the table below and
the corresponding figures for Vela are attached. All of these were run form the command line to avoid any issues in the script.
As one can see every thing look normal using any of these methods. Method 2 in the table is what I do in the script except that in
the script I also run ftsort on the merged ft1 file to speed up the execution of gtbary which we tend to use a lot at NRL.

 

Step 1

Step 2

Light Curve

Exposure

1.

gtselect: time selection=YES, event selection=NO

fselect: event selection=YES

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2.

gtselect: time selection=NO, event selection=NO

fselect: event selection=YES

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3.

gtselect: time selection=YES, event selection=YES

 

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4.

gtselect: time selection=NO, event selection=YES

 

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5.

fselect: event selection=YES

ft1merge

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6.

fselect: event selection=YES

gtselect: time selection=YES, event selection=NO

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So I became suspicious of the sorting done with ftsort. So I modified my script to not run ftsort and it is now all clear that with the new way
the FSSC is processing the events ftsort seems to miss things up and I don't recommend running it until we figure out what is going on with the
reprocessing of the files in the FSSC.

...

No ftsort

ftsort

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