isophote fit is fitting multiple sources in some images

[shruti-ramaiya]

I am trying to fit isophotes to multiple images of galaxies. For each galaxy image, there are multiple images of that galaxy itself but in different filters.

I mask out all my images prior to performing the fit but in some cases the masking isn't fantastic - of course when automating code on large data sets, it is unfeasible to perfect the masking of every single image.

Looking through some images, I noticed that for a particular image of a galaxy, where nearby stars haven't been greatly masked, the isophote fitting happens on two distinct sources, despite providing geometry arguments for the source I wish. I anticipated that sometimes other sources may be included in the galaxy isophote fit but I am unsure how to prevent multiple sources being fit as I wasn't even aware this was possible.

Ive attached examples below for a galaxy where in some images, the fit is as expected and in others, the nearby stars are fit with separate isophotes.

Any advice on how to prevent this when running code on large scales without the majority of fits being affected is much appreciated as I cannot find anything online about this happening before

Thank you