The Empirical Galaxy Generator (EGG) is a set of tools to generate fake galaxy catalogs and images with realistic positions, morphologies and fluxes from the far-ultraviolet to the far-infrared. The catalogs are generated by egg-gencat, and stored in binary FITS tables (column oriented). Another program, egg-2skymaker, is used to convert the generated catalog into ASCII tables suitable for ingestion by SkyMaker to produce realistic high resolution images (e.g., Hubble-like), while egg-gennoise and egg-genmap can be used to generate the low resolution images (e.g., Herschel-like).
These tools can be used to test source extraction codes, or to evaluate the reliability of any map-based science (stacking, dropout identification, ...).
You must have the vif library installed on your machine to compile EGG, configured at least with cfitsio and WCSlib support. CMake is used as a build system to handle dependency checks and compilation in a cross-platform way.
One you have installed all the dependencies, create yourself a directory called 'build' within the current directory. Navigate to the 'build' directory with your terminal, and call:
cmake ../
make
# then
make install
# or
sudo make install
The binaries will be generated in your system default binary folder. More detailed information can be found in the script install.sh or in the documentation ('doc/' folder).
See the output of 'egg-gencat help' after installing the programs. For further and more detailed help, see the documentation in the 'doc/' folder.