Freeware solutions for spectropolarimetric data reduction

TL;DR

This paper introduces a reliable, cost-effective Python-based freeware toolkit for spectropolarimetric data reduction and visualization, demonstrating its effectiveness with solar observation data as an alternative to expensive proprietary software.

Contribution

It presents a new open-source Python solution for spectropolarimetric data processing, integrating community-developed libraries for improved accessibility and cost savings.

Findings

Effective data reduction and visualization demonstrated on solar spectra.

Provides a powerful alternative to commercial software.

Accessible to researchers with limited resources.

Abstract

Most of the solar physicists use very expensive software for data reduction and visualization. We present hereafter a reliable freeware solution based on the Python language. This is made possible by the association of the latter with a small set of additional libraries developed in the scientific community. It provides then a very powerful and economical alternative to other interactive data languages. Although it can also be used for any kind of post-processing of data, we demonstrate the capabities of such a set of freeware tools using THeMIS observations of the second solar spectrum.