DRAGONS 4.0 released

The Gemini Science User Support department (SUSD) team is pleased to announce the release of DRAGONS 4.0. This release provides reduction capabilities for near-infrared (NIR) long-slit spectroscopic data obtained with the GNIRS instrument. In addition to the usual reduction procedures expected for NIR long-slit data, DRAGONS 4.0 also provides support for the reduction of thermal (L and M bands) and non-thermal (JHK bands) spectra and the ability to determine the wavelength calibration from features in the spectrum of the sky.

Of particular note, the DRAGONS 4.0 release also includes the capability to determine the telluric corrections and flux calibration for the reduced spectra. The telluric correction procedure, developed by Gemini Observatory Senior Scientific Programmer Chris Simpson, makes use of observations of an A0V telluric standard, a PHOENIX stellar model of Vega, pre-computed LBLRTM (Line-By-Line Radiative Transfer Model) atmospheric models, multi-component PCA decompositions of these models, and instrumental line spread functions. The procedure takes only a few seconds to simultaneously determine the telluric absorption spectrum and the instrumental response function. The resulting telluric and response spectra can then be applied to the science target to correct for telluric absorption and put the target spectrum on an absolute flux scale.

With this release, DRAGONS now provides data reduction support for the following instruments and modes:

Spectroscopy:

GNIRS long-slit
GHOST
GMOS long-slit (including nod-and-shuffle)

Imaging:

GMOS
NIRI
GSAOI
FLAMINGOS-2
GNIRS keyhole

In the next few months, the SUSD team plans to release two more versions of DRAGONS that will support reduction of data from the GNIRS cross-dispersed mode (DRAGONS 4.1) and the FLAMINGOS-2 long-slit mode (DRAGONS 4.2).

Documentation for DRAGONS, including instructions for the installation of the software and tutorials that demonstrate the reduction of data from the various instruments and modes, can be found on this page.