Automation

ECHOMOP provides automation to many aspects of echelle data reduction which have traditionally required substantial interactive assistance:

• Order location
• Cosmic ray pixel identification
• Object/Sky pixel classification
• Arc line identification

The provision of these features permits complete automatic reduction of echelle data frames. To help ensure the success of automatic reduction runs, special attention should be made to ensure that the following conditions are satisfied:

• A bright continuous spectrum image is provided for order tracing.
• The trace/arc/object images supplied are the correct ones. For instance, supplying the wrong arc image will cause problems if the orders are in different places on the detector.
• Constraints placed on expected range of wavelength and dispersion are wide enough. For example, if in doubt about the dispersion being 6 or 7 pixels per angstrom, provide a limits of MIN_DISPERSION=5, MAX_DISPERSION=10.