CUT: Extract a Brightness Profile Cut along any Position Angle

CUT will extract the surface-brightness profile of an object along an arbitrary position angle. The center of the object can be loaded with the AXES command or by the C keyword. A cut can also be offset from any center using the OFF keyword, as might be done to take a series of cuts at different locations along the major axis of a galaxy. The position angle is defined from the top of the image. Adding 180 to any PA will generate a cut running in the opposite direction. This can be used to compare or add profiles reflected about the center of a galaxy, for example. The default width is one pixel, and the height or length extends to the image borders. Both parameters are rounded to the nearest whole pixel. The PLOT keyword shows the bounds of the cut on the image display.

The cut is loaded into the 'dest' image buffer, and can be treated, analyzed, processed, saved, etc., as an image with a row dimension of one. The central column of the cut is always set to occur at column 0. Sinc interpolation is used to generated cuts of width 1; bilinear interpolation is used otherwise. Pixels are always summed across the width of the cut. Divide the resulting cut vector by the width in pixels (WIDTH= keyword) to normalize it after the fact.