Starfinder2: a software package for identification and analysis of point-like sources in adaptive optics images with spatially variable PSF

The Starfinder code has been one of the first attempts to face with the typical adaptive optics structured Point Spread Function (PSF) in dense star fields to accomplish astrometric and photometric analysis. The last release of the software can also handle a variation of the PSF across the Field of View (FoV). The PSF can be either extracted numerically from the brightest stars in the science field or computed externally and provided as an input in the form of a single image or a cube of images. This feature makes this software suitable to work with PSF models obtained by PSF reconstruction techniques. Starfinder also accepts as an input a user-defined parametric model and a variable pointing the PSF auxiliary data required by the parametric-model. This variable might containing also information about the spatial variation across the FoV. In this paper we describe the next release of Starfinder reporting also some examples and we give the recipe to use the tool for variable PSF.