Data Reduction Pipeline for the MMT and Magellan Infrared Spectrograph

TL;DR

This paper presents a new, publicly available data reduction pipeline for the MMT/Magellan Infrared Spectrograph, featuring novel algorithms for sky subtraction and telluric correction that enable high-quality, real-time data processing.

Contribution

The pipeline introduces innovative algorithms for sky subtraction reaching the photon noise limit and a hybrid telluric correction method, enhancing data quality and real-time performance.

Findings

Sky subtraction reaches Poisson noise limit

Pipeline enables real-time data reduction

High-quality data demonstrated on example dataset

Abstract

We describe the new spectroscopic data reduction pipeline for the multi-object MMT/Magellan Infrared Spectrograph. The pipeline is implemented in idl as a stand-alone package and is publicly available in both stable and development versions. We describe novel algorithms for sky subtraction and correction for telluric absorption. We demonstrate that our sky subtraction technique reaches the Poisson limit set by the photon statistics. Our telluric correction uses a hybrid approach by first computing a correction function from an observed stellar spectrum, and then differentially correcting it using a grid of atmosphere transmission models for the target airmass value. The pipeline provides a sufficient level of performance for real time reduction and thus enables data quality control during observations. We reduce an example dataset to demonstrate the high data reduction quality.