Introduction

`gauss' is a Figaro program for interactive fitting of Gaussians to an emission or absorption line spectrum. The program is suitable for handling both low resolution data, where line fluxes of many lines are required, or high resolution data where a multiple Gaussian fit to a single line profile is obtained. The line-free continuum is fitted by a polynomial of desired order with iterative rejection of points greater than a given distance from the fit. The interactive line fit is optimised by minimising the sum of squared residuals between the observed and fitted profiles. The results of the fit are written to a data file. The fitting profile can be saved as a spectrum.