NYU Value-Added Galaxy Catalog

Yanny files

Yanny parameter files (or FTCL files) are a special ASCII format. They are fully described at the SDSS Data Release site.

In idlutils, there are the routines:

yanny_readone
yanny_read
yanny_write

to read and write these files. Generally speaking, you will only need to use yanny_readone(), which converts a Yanny file to an IDL struct (as long as the file has only one structure in it).

For the IDL-impaired, there is a Perl module written by Nikhil Padmanabhan, which you can find in the photoop repository (which we recommend) or here (look in the first few lines of the routine run2stripe to see how it is used).

Finally, of course, these are simply ASCII files which you can read with anything you want. (It is just that using the above software will be more robust if we decide to add extra columns to the file).

NYU Value-Added Galaxy Catalog

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