Known Bugs in the UVOT software
See also: UVOT Digest for discussion of open issues with UVOT software.
Swift users are encouraged to submit bug reports to swifthelp via our Feedback form, so they can be tracked and added to this list.
Priority code used in list, below: Yellow (3) = minor, Orange (2) = important, Red (1) = urgent. Green (:)) = fixed and will be available in the next build.
| Date | Tool | Priority | Symptom |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2008-06-27 | uvotevgrism | 1 | This tool is currently untested and we do not recommend using it. Instead, we advise users covert any grism event data to image files, and then run uvotimgrism. |
| 2008-06-27 | uvotflatfield | 1 | Users should use uvotlss to apply large-scale sensitivity corrections to UVOT images, not uvotflatfield. |
| 2008-06-27 | uvot2pha | 2 | Uvot2pha does not do coincidence corrections, aperture corrections, or large-scale sensitivity corrections when it extracts count rates from UVOT SKY images. This will be corrected in a future version of the software. For now we recommend that users apply their own corrections using uvotcoincidence, uvotapercorr, and uvotlss as appropriate. |
| 2007-04-26 | uvotdetect | 2 | Current version gives unreliable results when given an exposure map. We recommend not using an exposure map when working with unsummed images. When working with summed images, we recommend setting "expopt=ALPHA". |
| 2008-06-27 | uvotevtlc | 2 | Coincidence corrections are not applied in a strictly correct manner. (They are only correct when a circular source aperature with a radius of five arcseconds is used.) This will be fixed in the next software release. |
| 2008-06-27 | uvotproduct | 2 | There is a known issue in uvotproduct that can cause the significances, upper limits, and magnitude errors to be incorrect for very faint sources. Users should use caution when considering reported detections with magnitude errors greater than approximately 0.3 mag. |
| 2008-06-27 | uvotapercorr | 3 | Uvotapercorr assumes that the white PSF is the same as the B-band PSF. |
| 2008-06-27 | uvotimsum | 3 | Current version doesn't include the image binning keywords. The software defaults to the coarsest binning of the input images, but allows arbitrary binning. Previous bug involving uvotsim adding two exposures that have different time frames has been fixed. As of HEASoft 6.5, uvotimsum will check that frame times match by default. |
| 2008-06-27 | uvotmag | :) | Uvotmag has been depreciated. Users should use uvotflux instead. |
| 2008-06-27 | uvotexpcorr | :) | The functionality of this tool has been mostly superceded by routines in uvot2fits to identify and correct problems with onboard shift and add that result in lower exposure time. We recommend that this tool no longer be used. |
| 2008-06-27 | uvotexpmap | :) | Previous version(s) did not identify exposure time variations near the edges due to the shift and add algorithm used to correct for attitude changes. As of HEASoft 6.5 there is good support for shift and add. |
| 2008-04-17 | uvotmaghist | :) | The time columns (TIME and MET) in the 6.3.1 release were inadvertently changed to report the start rather than the mid-time of the exposure. As of HEASoft 6.4, they again report the mid-time of the exposure. Note that the TIMEPIXR keyword is set to 0.0 when start times are used, and to 0.5 when mid-times are used. |
If you have a question about Swift, please contact us via the Feedback form.