Alignment: I did a more thorough test of the aligner, and found an error that was getting me the wrong results. I'm still getting distinctly different results than I got with imalign, but I'm not convinced they're wrong. One problem I have to deal with is the ambiguity between pointing model applied / no pointing model applied. In retrospect, I should have done ALL of the maps with no pointing model: it would be simpler to maintain a self-consistent set of alignment corrections. However, since that isn't what I did - and there isn't enough memory to host both data sets at the moment - I've dealt with the problem by adding all of the offsets to the header. Hopefully now it will be obvious if and what offsets have been applied, both pointing model and 'manual', from header keywords. Sadly, it was a pain to get that to work - IDL's _extra does not work the same way as normal keyword passing, which is disappointing and frustrating because it made me rename a lot of variables that should not have been renamed. IF this alignment fails to produce perfect results (which I don't really expect to happen - it will just take time to debug), it is still a good first step, and all we'd really need to do is use bolocat to pull out sources from the reference image and then match those in the others, doing the same thing imalign does. It wouldn't be difficult but it would be time consuming to program. Had a bunch of ideas during my insomnia last night, but I'm afraid I forgot most of them... One idea was related to the use of MAD as opposed to STDDEV: it may allow for a more robust sigma-rejection for automated flagging. But that's difficult. Another thought was using the maps to auto-identify glitches. To do this, I'd make a combined map and an individual map, hastrom them, and subtract the combined from the individual. We could then probably pretty easily spot any glitches; they should be the only outliers left, in principle. I'll test that idea, but it actually looks less promising than I'd hoped. Things are not coming out right in preliminary tests - huge residuals.