The VIMOS Integral Field Unit: Data-Reduction Methods and Quality Assessment

A. Zanichelli (1) , Bianca Garilli (2) , Marco Scodeggio (2) , P. Franzetti (2) , D. Rizzo (3) , D. Maccagni (2) , R. Merighi (4) , J.-P. Picat (3) , Olivier Le Fèvre (5) , S. Foucaud (2) , D. Bottini (2) , V. Le Brun (5) , R. Scaramella (1) , Laurence Tresse (5) , G. Vettolani (1) , C. Adami (5) , M. Arnaboldi (6) , S. Arnouts (5) , Sandro Bardelli (4) , M. Bolzonella (7) , A. Cappi (4) , Stéphane Charlot (8, 9) , Paolo Ciliegi (4) , Thierry Contini (3) , I. Gavignaud (3, 10) , L. Guzzo (11) , Olivier Ilbert (5) , Angela Iovino (11) , Henry J. Mccracken (9, 12) , B. Marano (7) , Christian Marinoni (5) , G. Mathez (3) , A. Mazure (5) , Baptiste Meneux (5) , S. Paltani (5) , R. Pello (3) , Agnieszka Pollo (11) , L. Pozzetti (4) , M. Radovich (6) , G. Zamorani (4) , E. Zucca (4)

1 IRA-INAF, Bologna
2 IASF-Milano - Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica Cosmica
3 LATT - Laboratoire Astrophysique de Toulouse-Tarbes
4 OABO - INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Bologna
5 LAM - Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille
6 INAF-OAC - INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte
7 UNIBO - Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna = University of Bologna
8 MPA - Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik
9 IAP - Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris
10 ESO - European Southern Observatory
11 INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera
12 LERMA - Laboratoire d'Etude du Rayonnement et de la Matière en Astrophysique

With the new generation of spectrographs, integral field spectroscopy is becoming a widely used observational technique. The Integral Field Unit (IFU) of the Visible Multi-Object Spectrograph (VIMOS) on the ESO VLT allows sampling of a field as large as 54^''×54^'', covered by 6400 fibers coupled with microlenses. We present here the methods of the data-processing software that has been developed to extract the astrophysical signal of faint sources from the VIMOS IFU observations. We focus on the treatment of the fiber-to-fiber relative transmission and the sky subtraction, and the dedicated tasks we have built to address the peculiarities and unprecedented complexity of the data set. We review the automated process we have developed under the VIPGI data organization and reduction environment (Scodeggio et al. 2005), along with the quality control performed to validate the process. The VIPGI IFU data-processing environment has been available to the scientific community to process VIMOS IFU data since 2003 November.

Domaines: Astrophysique [astro-ph]

A. Zanichelli, Bianca Garilli, Marco Scodeggio, P. Franzetti, D. Rizzo, et al.. The VIMOS Integral Field Unit: Data-Reduction Methods and Quality Assessment. Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 2005, 117, pp.1271-1283. ⟨10.1086/496936⟩. ⟨hal-03785712⟩