This is a set of IDL tasks which work in conjunction with Sextractor and Swarp to quickly and efficiently reduce data from the WIRC camera at Palomar. It could easily be adapted to handle other near-IR cameras with the same methodology. A camera like WIRC produces data at a truly prodigious rate, and the task of reducing what could easily be several hundred 2048x2048 frames per night exceeds what can still be done reasonably by hand, hence the need for automation. This package aims to streamline as much as possible the data reduction process, so that an entire night of data can be easily reduced in as little as a day.

With the code, you will carry out all the standard procedures: making darks and flats, sky-subtracting, and also photometric and astrometric calibration and reprojection. The code uses the well-known technique of a running median sky - that is, every frame gets a unique sky frame generated for it, created from temporally adjacent, dithered images.

The code is written such that it depends heavily on the idea of generating sky frames directly from the data. For large extended objects, where users may have used chopping to sample the sky, this will not work unmodified. However, many of the routines used for making flats and darks, etc. will work as is. Clever users can still make the sky-subtraction work, they will just have to manipulate the input file lists by hand.

Tarball - a gzipped tarball containing the scripts and the pdf manual.

PDF - latest version of the pdf documentation.