The VIMOS Integral Field Unit: data reduction methods and quality assessment

Abstract

With new generation spectrographs integral field spectroscopy is becoming a widely used observational technique. The Integral Field Unit of the VIsible Multi-Object Spectrograph on the ESO-VLT allows to sample a field as large as 54" x 54" covered by 6400 fibers coupled with micro-lenses. We are presenting here the methods of the data processing software developed to extract the astrophysical signal of faint sources from the VIMOS IFU observations. We focus on the treatment of the fiber-to-fiber relative transmission and the sky subtraction, and the dedicated tasks we have built to address the peculiarities and unprecedented complexity of the dataset. We review the automated process we have developed under the VIPGI data organization and reduction environment (Scodeggio et al. 2005), along with the quality control performed to validate the process. The VIPGI-IFU data processing environment is available to the scientific community to process VIMOS-IFU data since November 2003.

19 pages, 10 figures and 1 table. Accepted for publication in PASP

References in corpus (3)

• The SAURON project. I. The panoramic integral-field spectrograph
• The SAURON project - III. Integral-field absorption-line kinematics of 48 elliptical and lenticular galaxies
• The VVDS data reduction pipeline: introducing VIPGI, the VIMOS Interactive Pipeline and Graphical Interface

Cited by in corpus (33)

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