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