Sky Subtraction¶
The pipeline performs automatic sky subtraction by identifying areas of the sky that do not contain objects. If this fails, it is possible to modify the sky subtraction algorithm in two ways: (1) by using a different frame as the sky frame and (2) by specifying areas of the target or sky frame to exclude from the calculation of the sky (because they are contaminated by an object, for example).
To specify the preferred method for sky subtraction, create a file in the data directory called kcwi.sky
. For each KCWI frame
for which you want to modify the sky subtraction algorithm, enter a row with this format:
raw_object_file.fits raw_sky_frame.fits <mask.fits>
If you want to specify an external sky frame, only use the first two columns and do not specify a mask file.
If you want to use a mask on the original file, make sure that the first two columns contain the same file name and add the mask file.
Building a mask file¶
To build a mask file based on ds9
regions, use the script kcwi_masksky_ds9.py
contained in the scripts
directory.
This script uses the _intf.fits
files which are generated as part of the first execution of the pipeline. You should run the pipeline first and verify the quality
of the sky subtraction. If you are not satisfied with the sky subtraction, use the procedure described here and run the pipeline again.
To start, display the _intf.fits
frame on ds9
and create regions around areas of the frame that you would like to exclude.
Save the regions to a file and run the kcwi_mask_sky command indicating the file name (_intf.fits
) and the region file.
This will produce a mask file that can be added to the kcwi.sky
file.
Re-run the reduction of this file¶
Rather than re-run the entire pipeline, it is possible to run it only on the file that needs a better sky subtraction.
The instructions are listed in Running the pipeline. In summary, you will need to
specify just one file, the one for which you want to improve the sky subtraction
and make sure that clobber
is set to True in the config file.
reduce_kcwi -f myfile.fits