A Production System for Radial Velocity Measurements

Douglas J. Mink and William F. Wyatt

Abstract

A system has been developed at the Center for Astrophysics to mass-produce and archive radial velocity measurements. One-dimensional spectra arriving as FITS files are reduced and stored in an extensible archive format which contains complete information about the reduction process. In order to keep over 150,000 reduced spectra on-line for analysis, the format combines information compactly in variable-length ASCII and binary records. Each spectrum in the archive occupies one file which, for each instrument, has a unique identifying number. A collection of stand-alone Fortran programs allow examination of the archived spectra, translation to a portable format, and co-addition of spectra, and several other functions. A library of Fortran-callable access subroutines allows scientists to use the archive with their own programs. IRAF tasks to import and analyze archived spectra have been integrated with the Fortran and C programs to take advantage of IRAF's data analysis and display capabilities.

Presented at the First Annual Conference on Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems (ADASS 91) in Tucson, Arizona in November 1991
Published in Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems I, ASP Conf. Ser., Vol. 25, eds. D.M. Worrall, C. Biemesderfer, and J. Barnes, p. 439-441 (1992).