Practically all kinds of astronomical images, containing a number of stars and/or galaxies, can be treated with the INVENTORY commands. Up to now INVENTORY has been used or tested on data from the following instruments: Schmidt plates, CCD--frames taken with several telescopes, direct unaided and electronographic plates taken with the ESO 3.6m telescope.
The applicability of INVENTORY commands is limited to frames that contain more than say 100 and less than 8000 objects. The lower limit concerns a single frame. If one has a number of frames each containing 20 or even a smaller number of objects, it is still worthwhile to use INVENTORY. A CLASSIFY/INV command requires:
Note The CPU time required depends approximately linearly on the total number of pixels and on the total number of found objects (including defects). The demo frame with little over 100000 pixels and 200 objects needs 12.4, 10.7, and 2.5 sec of CPU time for executing the SEARCH/INV command, the base version of ANALYSE/INV command, and the CLASSIFY/INV command respectively with the use of the ESO VAX 8600 computer.