This part of the cookbook provides a set of simple recipes for reducing CCD images and performing various related auxiliary tasks. The recipes are:
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The first three recipes (Sections to )
demonstrate preliminary, auxiliary tasks. Two alternative recipes are
provided for removing the instrumental effects from CCD images.
Section is a very simple recipe using software
operated from an easy-to-use GUI (Graphical User Interface).
Section is a more advanced recipe using software operated
from the Unix command line. Though more complicated than the preceding
recipe it offers more flexibility and perhaps greater insight into the
operations being performed on the data. Section is an
example of combining reduced images.
Recipes to form a natural sequence and are
intended to be worked through in the order in which they are given. Each
of these recipes consists of a set of numbered steps which you can follow
and example data are provided with the cookbook so that you can work through
them yourself. On Starlink systems these example data are kept in directory:
/star/examples/sc5/data
These data are R band images of the spiral galaxy NGC 2336 obtained with the Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope (JKT) on La Palma. They were obtained from the CD-ROM Astronomical Images by Jaffe[14]. However, the same data are publicly available from the ING (Isaac Newton Group) data archive maintained at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge. See URL:
http://archive.ast.cam.ac.uk/
For technical reasons there are some differences in the arrangement of the FITS headers in the archive and CD-ROM versions of the files but both contain identical astronomical information.
The final two recipes, Reading FITS Files from Tape
(Section ) and Handling Large Images
(Section ) are rather different. They contain material
which could not be presented conveniently as a set of numbered steps
which you can follow, but rather are given as a set of hints and tips.
The packages used in the recipes in this cookbook are GAIA (see SUN/214[11]), CCDPACK (see SUN/139[10]), KAPPA (see SUN/95[6]) and ESP (see SUN/190[12]). These items should all be available at all Starlink sites. If you have any difficulty in accessing them then see your site manager in the first instance. In all cases on-line hypertext versions of the manuals are available via the command showme. For example, to display the CCDPACK manual, SUN/139, you would simply type:
showme sun139
IRAF examples equivalent to the recipes for displaying images
(Section ) and calculating statistics (Section )
are included in SG/12[22], the introduction to
IRAF on Starlink systems. IRAF includes the powerful and flexible package
CCDRED for reducing CCD data; see Section for a list of the
documentation for it.
The 2-D CCD Data Reduction Cookbook