It was specifically developed to cope with multi-band imaging data as are common in modern extragalactic imaging surveys, and to be modular and therefore easily adaptable to specific needs.
Specifically, the package is designed to work under conditions of inhomogeneous background noise across the detection frame, and, additionally, perform accurate aperture photometry in image sets not sharing a common coordinate system or pixel scale as is often the case in present-day extragalactic survey work.
The package was developed for and used in the MUNICS survey.
A paper describing the package appeared in A&A, 2003, 397, 371, and you can have a quick look at the man page here.
The current version is 1.2.8, you can get it here yoda-1.2.8.tar.gz.
YODA is implemented in C++, and is developed under UNIX. It should be portable to essentially any hardware and software architecture where a reasonably ANSI-compliant C++ compiler is available, ideally GCC. It has been so far verified to run under Linux/x86, Linux/PowerPC, Solaris/SPARC, Digital-UNIX/Alpha, and MacOS X/PowerPC and x86 using GCC versions 2.95.2, 3.X, and 4.X. Additionally, it is known to work under Solaris/SPARC using Sun's CC and under AIX/PowerPC using IBM's VisualAge xlC 6 and above.
If you want to try it out, make sure GCC is installed on your
machine (at least version 2.95.2, for sufficient C++ template
support), then download the source
(Version 1.2.8) and compile it on your machine. Configuration for
a specific platform is done automatically using GNU autoconf, so you
don't have to worry about byte order, compiler flags etc.:
gunzip yoda-1.2.8.tar.gz tar -xf yoda-1.2.8 cd yoda-1.2.8 ./configure make cp src/yoda ~/bin --- or wherever you like yoda --help --- for a list of command-line options
If you can't compile it yourself for some reason, or have any questions, contact me at drory at astro dot as dot utexas dot edu. Comments are welcome, as well are contributions of code, ideas, experience, ports to more platforms etc.
I'll post documentation on this site soon. In the meantime, ask me. The man page provides some information for getting started as well as some example uses.