MASE: A New Data--Reduction Pipeline for the Magellan Echellette Spectrograph

TL;DR

The paper presents MASE, a comprehensive data reduction pipeline for the Magellan Echellette Spectrograph, enabling efficient calibration, extraction, and flux calibration of optical spectra with high accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces MASE, a new IDL-based pipeline that automates the entire data reduction process for MAGE, including calibration and extraction, with real-time capabilities.

Findings

Achieves ~5 km/s RMS wavelength calibration accuracy

Provides flux calibration better than 10%

Includes a lightweight version for real-time data analysis

Abstract

We introduce a data reduction package written in Interactive Data Language (IDL) for the Magellan Echellete Spectrograph (MAGE). MAGE is a medium-resolution (R ~4100), cross-dispersed, optical spectrograph, with coverage from ~3000-10000 Angstroms. The MAGE Spectral Extractor (MASE) incorporates the entire image reduction and calibration process, including bias subtraction, flat fielding, wavelength calibration, sky subtraction, object extraction and flux calibration of point sources. We include examples of the user interface and reduced spectra. We show that the wavelength calibration is sufficient to achieve ~5 km/s RMS accuracy and relative flux calibrations better than 10%. A light-weight version of the full reduction pipeline has been included for real-time source extraction and signal-to-noise estimation at the telescope.