“A table is a collection of related data held in a structured format within a database. It consists of columns, and rows.” (from Wikipedia). Each column in the table contains the values of one property and each row is a collection of properties (columns) for one target object. For example, let’s assume you have just ran MakeCatalog (see MakeCatalog) on an image to measure some properties for the labeled regions (which might be detected galaxies for example) in the image. For each labeled region (detected galaxy), there will be a row which groups its measured properties as columns, one column for each property. One such property can be the object’s magnitude, which is the sum of pixels with that label, or its center can be defined as the light-weighted average value of those pixels. Many such properties can be derived from the raw pixel values and their position, see Invoking MakeCatalog for a long list.
As a summary, for each labeled region (or, galaxy) we have one row and for each measured property we have one column. This high-level structure is usually the first step for higher-level analysis, for example, finding the stellar mass or photometric redshift from magnitudes in multiple colors. Thus, tables are not just outputs of programs, in fact it is much more common for tables to be inputs of programs. For example, to make a mock galaxy image, you need to feed in the properties of each galaxy into MakeProfiles for it do the inverse of the process above and make a simulated image from a catalog, see Sufi simulates a detection. In other cases, you can feed a table into Crop and it will crop out regions centered on the positions within the table, see Reddest clumps, cutouts and parallelization. So to end this relatively long introduction, tables play a very important role in astronomy, or generally all branches of data analysis.
In Recognized table formats the currently recognized table formats in Gnuastro are discussed. You can use any of these tables as input or ask for them to be built as output. The most common type of table format is a simple plain text file with each row on one line and columns separated by white space characters, this format is easy to read/write by eye/hand. To give it the full functionality of more specific table types like the FITS tables, Gnuastro has a special convention which you can use to give each column a name, type, unit, and comments, while still being readable by other plain text table readers. This convention is described in Gnuastro text table format.
When tables are input to a program, the program reading it needs to know which column(s) it should use for its desired purposes. Gnuastro’s programs all follow a similar convention, on the way you can select columns in a table. They are thoroughly discussed in Selecting table columns.
GNU Astronomy Utilities 0.22 manual, February 2024.