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 phy++ 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.