Solvepol: a reduction pipeline for imaging polarimetry data

TL;DR

Solvepol is a fully automated data pipeline for imaging polarimetry that reduces and analyzes data efficiently, producing results consistent with traditional methods and supporting future wide-field polarimetric surveys.

Contribution

It introduces a new automated pipeline, Solvepol, optimized for specific polarimeters and adaptable for large-scale sky surveys, enhancing data processing efficiency.

Findings

Solvepol produces results consistent with IRAF-based reductions.

It is optimized for the IAGPOL polarimeter at USP.

Solvepol successfully processes standard star data.

Abstract

We present a newly, fully automated, data pipeline: Solvepol, designed to reduce and analyze polarimetric data. It has been optimized for imaging data from the Instituto de Astronomia, Geofisica e Ciencias Atmosfericas (IAG) of the University of Sao Paulo (USP), calcite Savart prism plate-based IAGPOL polarimeter. Solvepol is also the basis of a reduction pipeline for the wide-field optical polarimeter that will execute SOUTH POL, a survey of the polarized Southern sky. Solvepol was written using the interactive data language (IDL) and is based on the image reduction and analysis facility (IRAF) task pccdpack, developed by our polarimetry group. We present and discuss reduced data from standard stars and other fields and compare these results with those obtained in the IRAF environment. Our analysis shows that Solvepol, in addition to being a fully automated pipeline, produces results consistent with those reduced by pccdpack and reported in the literature.