SINFONI data reduction software

The adaptive optics assisted near-infrared integral-field spectrograph SINFONI has been successfully commissioned at the ESO VLT and has started science operations early 2005. Its data reduction package SPRED, developed at MPE, became the core of the data reduction pipeline at the VLT and the basic tool for all scientific data reduction tasks. This package is written in C and is wrapped around a Python script interface. It uses a modified version of the C library eclipse [Devillard, N., 1999. In: Mehringer, D.M., Plante, R.L., Roberts, D.A., (Eds.), ASP Conf. Ser., vol. 172, ADASS VIII, ASP, San Francisco, p. 333.] for basic image operations. Calibration and science reductions are performed via a coherent set of commands. Some of its main objectives are the precise wavelength calibration, the proper removal of artifacts, the correction for image distortion, the cube creation and combination. A single cube is a 3D fits file with 64 x 60 spatial pixels each of them holding a spectrum of approximately 2000 elements. An independent software tool; Qfitsview has also been developed at MPE to interactively examine those data cubes. This interface tool has been optimized for fast interaction with the user and the handling of big data cubes files. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.