Software

The format of both the mock catalogue files and the corresponding selection function files are fully described, so that users can write their own programs to read and manipulate the data.

For fortran users we provide a few subroutines, which may be useful for reading the mock catalogues and generating random catalogues.

1: Reading the Mock Catalogues

The parent or fully sampled mock catalogues can each be read using the subroutine mockread .

This file also contains some other useful subroutines including sampleread2(samplefile,...) whose purpose is to read redshift sample from parent catalogue consistent with the status of the 2dF survey at the date specified by the "samplefile".

2: Survey Geometry

A set of subroutines which define the geometry of each survey. For the case of the PSCZ survey one also needs a copy of the data file mask_pscz.data which is used to define the masked region on the sky.

3: Generating Random Catalogues

For some analysis (e.g. the traditional Data-Random paircounting method of estimating correlation functions) it is necessary to be able to generate "random" galaxy poistions consistent with the geometry and radial selection function of the survey being analyzed. We provide a subroutine ran_cat to generate random galaxy positions consistent with the selection criteria of any one of the mock catalogues. This must be linked with the additional subroutines , which define the geometrical survey boundaries. An example programme demonstrates how to set up and us this subroutine.