The new REDUCEME document

REDUCEME is an astronomical data reduction package, specially devoted to the analysis of long-slit spectroscopic data. This software was created as part of the thesis work of N. Cardiel, developed under the supervision of J. Gorgas, at the Departamento de Astrofísica of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. The initial help of S. Pedraz, J. Cenarro and O. Alonso was very important in finding bugs and suggesting modifications, which have improved most of the programs. Since then, more people have also contributed with comments and suggestions (A. Gil de Paz, E. García-Dabó, P. Sánchez-Blázquez, E. Mármol-Queraltó, and E. Toloba). Many thanks to all them.

We are making this software freely available through this WEB page because we think some of the programs may be useful for other people, but we are extremely far from providing strong support (if any!) since we never had in mind the idea of creating a public package. So, please, if you are planning to use it, be aware of that.

This package does not intend to be a general and complete spectroscopic data reduction package, and it has been created strongly biased to solve the needs we have encountered during the reduction of our long-slit spectroscopic data. Unfortunately, and due to historical reasons, this software does not use FITS as the data format, but the unformatted FORTRAN raw format (which, in old times, used to be a very fast way to access files with slow computers). This means that any potential user should transform the FITS files to REDUCEME format. The reverse operation (from REDUCEME to FITS format) is also available.

This package consists in a set of programs written in FORTRAN 77, and also includes some shell scripts (using the C shell syntax) to perform routine tasks (very recently we have started to write some programs in C). This document contains an user description of the programs, giving some guidelines to the reader who wants to extend their capabilities, with the inclusion of own external programs.

Graphics (line plots and images) in this package are done with the help of the excelent library PGPLOT. A subset of subroutines, called BUTTON, have been specially written to enable the user to communicate interactively with the image display employing graphic buttons.

One of the most interesting advantages of using REDUCEME programs is that for each image an associated error image can also be processed throughout the reduction process, allowing for a careful control of the error propagation. A more detailed description of this technique, and its application to the measurement of line-strength indices, is given in these papers:

Paper 1: Reliable random error estimation in the measurement of line-strength indices, Cardiel et al. (1998).
Paper 2: Proper handling of random errors and distortions in astronomical data analysis, Cardiel et al. (2002).
Paper 3: A New Approach in Data Reduction: Proper Handling of Random Errors and Image Distortions, Cardiel et al. (2003).
Paper 4: Using spectroscopic data to disentangle stellar population properties, Cardiel et al. (2004).

You can also find a general description of REDUCEME in Chapter 3 of my PhD Thesis (see also appendix B and C). Yes, it is in spanish!

Since there is no explicit publication describing this package, you can acknowledge the use of REDUCEME by citing Cardiel (1999):
Cardiel, N., 1999, Ph.D. thesis, Universidad Complutense de Madrid

In addition, you can find here how to create the REDUCEME logo in LaTeX.

Note: this WEB page is the only official documentation available. Send questions and suggestions to ncl astrax.fis.ucm.es

The current version has been tested under Linux (RedHat and SuSe)