InvisLRIS
While a postdoc at the University of Hawai’i (2010-2013), I collected a lot of Keck LRIS data on pseudo-invisible targets in the hopes of detecting the odd few-sigma emission line (unfortunately dusty galaxies tend to be amongst the most optically-invisible interesting targets out there). These targets were invisible in the sense that a large fraction of them were expected to show no continuum emission even after several hours of integration per slitmask. When reducing the data with existing pipelines (see XIDL LowRedux package and Dan Stern’s bogus package), nothing dealt with these invisible targets very well because the continuum is often used to distinguish ‘object’ spectra from ‘sky’ spectra. So I wrote my own LRIS pipeline to deal with this in IDL. It’s very interactive but easily hackable, with a step by step approach and requires information regarding slitmask design. This is by no means an easy-to-run package and should be used at your own risk, but if you’re in a similar position of looking at relatively invisible targets, it will be a helpful template for running your reductions.
You can download all of the scripts here: invislris.tar.gz
Below is a flow chart of how the code should be implemented. Just
place the scripts in the directory where your raw data sits for a
given mask and run them in IDL using @
Email me with questions. Use at your own risk. The code is not meant to be a full-proof blackbox, but instead a tool for help with accompanying consultation.