How to keep FITS header when stacking?

Posted by Luca on Aug 06, 2017; 5:46pm
URL: http://astroimagej.170.s1.nabble.com/How-to-keep-FITS-header-when-stacking-tp725.html

Hello everyone, I am using Astroimagej for the photometry utilities.

The photometry tool uses parameters written inside the FITS header to find error bars and to correctly set the time at which each picture has been taken. Sometimes though, we need to STACK multiple images to reduce the signal to noise ratio, and this can be done with the "Grouped Z Project" tool under Image\Stacks\Tools.

Problem is, once the stacking is done (example: reduce a 700 image stack into a 350 stack by summing 2 subsequent images) there's nothing in the FITS header anymore. This makes sense because the stacking might change some of the parameters written inside, but it makes impossible to do photometry with the new stack. And there's no way, as far as I know, to make a new FITS header with the informations we need (by the way, the Fits_header_standalone_editor plugin doesn't work). I guess the solution would be to make a macro that automatically adjusts the time of exposure by summing the one found in each image but there's also no way to make that happen since there's no command as far as I know that enables to automatically edit the FITS header.

Any solution?