Automatic Echelle Spectrograph Wavelength Calibration

TL;DR

This paper introduces an automatic, scale-invariant wavelength calibration algorithm for echelle spectrographs that achieves high precision without requiring prior spectral feature positions or order numbers, demonstrated on multiple instruments.

Contribution

The authors present a novel fully automatic wavelength calibration method that does not depend on feature anchoring or order identification, applicable to various spectrographs.

Findings

Achieves 10 m/s velocity precision on NRES

Achieves 1 m/s velocity precision on HARPS

Provides an open-source Python package for calibration

Abstract

Time domain astronomy and the increasing number of exoplanet candidates call for reliable, robust, and automatic wavelength calibration. We present an algorithm for wavelength calibrating \'echelle spectrographs that uses order-by-order extracted spectra and a list of laboratory wavelengths. Our approach is fully automatic and does not need the pixel locations of certain spectral features with which to anchor the wavelength solution, nor the true order number of each diffraction order. We use spectral features that are duplicated in adjacent orders to establish the scale-invariant component of the wavelength solution. We then match the central wavelengths of spectral features to laboratory wavelengths to establish the scale and higher order components of the wavelength solution. We demonstrate our method on the four spectrographs of Las Cumbres Observatory's Network of Robotic \'Echelle Spectrographs (NRES), on the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) spectrograph, and on synthetic data. We obtain a velocity-equivalent precision of 10 m/s on NRES. We achieve 1 m/s on HARPS, which agrees with the precision reported by the HARPS team. On synthetic data, we achieve the velocity precision set by Gaussian centroiding errors. Our algorithm likely holds for a wide range of spectrographs beyond the five presented here. We provide an open-source Python package, xwavecal (https://github.com/gmbrandt/xwavecal/), which outputs wavelength calibrated spectra as well as the wavelengths of spectral features.