New/updated TSpec reduction software?

[Eilat Glikman]

Dear TSpec users,

greetings from Palomar.  Tonight is my fourth night of a six-night run.  The weather has been great and Ive gotten lots of good spectra. 

I was going to try to reduce some, but since I have a new computer I thought that instead of installing my usual Spextool3 package I would reach out to this community and see if there have been any updates/improvement to the Spextool3 package that handles TSpec, and/or if any other pipelines have come out that I missed which also do TSpec reductions.  

I know FIRE has some nifty pipeline with an improved sky subtraction algorithm, so I was wondering if anything like this has been adapted for TSpec?

Your thoughts and advice are most appreciated!

Cheers,

Eilat

[Michael Cushing]

Hi Eilat,

So now there really aren't any new updates. Two things of note. As many of you know, SpeX is being upgraded and so I will be releasing v4.0 of Spextool (data take with the "old" SpeX will have to be reduced with v3.4) in a few months. That version will contain the TSpec routines and so no one will have to carry around Spextool and Spextool3. As for the bsplines, I would *love* to include that into the code but realistically that probably isn't going to happen any time soon. I did develop a version of the background subtraction that uses bsplines (well, bsplines in the lambda dimension and polynomials in the spatial dimension - basically the sloan code) but it left residuals in the data that I was uncomfortable with. It is likely that Bill Vacca and I will be writing code for the iSHELL on the IRTF and will probably have to dig into this more so maybe in a year or two?

As for other packages, I don't know of any, but I don't use TSpec any more and so am probably not the best person to ask.

-Mike

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[Eilat Glikman]

Mike, Thanks so much for this!  After I sent my email I googled around a bit and came across this page:

http://spider.ipac.caltech.edu/staff/babar/tspec/tspecpickup.html

Which has some new-seeming documentation.  I installed it and ran into a few bugs/issues.  First, the program needs to be able to use centertlb.pro which is a retired coyote program, so I had to add it to my (new computer's) idl library.  Not a big deal but something a newbie might not know how to do.  

Another thing that puzzled me is that since IDL 8, the astrolib command "legend" had been renamed "al_legend" because there is a native "legend" in IDL.  This causes almost everything in the world to crash (OSIRIS pipeline, GANDALF, Spextool) so I have gotten into the habit of just doing a grep on all the pro files to see if there are any "legend"s that need to be replaced with "al_legend"s, but the tar file in the above link returned nothing when i did a grep for "legend".  This seemed weird to me because the I know that there are legends in some of the tellcor plots.  So I cant tell if this tar file is newer or older, bad or good.  

Im at Palomar right now so doing a quick comparison to the code that is installed on my other computer is not possible.

On a separate note, I cant wait to use the new SpeX!! 

Cheers,

Eilat