If you’re now wondering how you should go about reducing your data and don’t want to read this very long document, then this is the place to start. Later sections are rather more technical or describe data registration and related topics and should really only be consulted when the need arises.
If you are sitting at an X display then type the commands:
These commands will start the CCDPACK GUI. The GUI will lead you through the stages necessary for organising your data so that it can be scheduled for processing and will start a background job to do the reduction. The GUI has a context sensitive help system, so pull down the Help menu and choose On Window to get information about your immediate concerns (the help will actually appear in a hypertext browser – netscape by default). Hopefully this should be enough to get you started but read the next few paragraphs if you have time.
The underlying purpose of XREDUCE is to get sufficient information gathered about your data so that it can plan a reduction schedule. It can do this in one of two ways. Either you can select from a list of known telescope/detector combinations, or enter all the information required yourself (with lots of help of course). XREDUCE just really needs to know what package options to use, where a few geometric features of the CCD are (if needed) and the types of the various input frames (it needs to know which frames are bias, flatfields, darks and the real astronomical ones, called “target frames”).
If you’re fortunate then your data will contain a description of itself in a form that XREDUCE can understand. In this case all you need to do is identify the detector and then go on to list all the frames you want to process. If your data is from a detector with limited information available (such as the geometries of the various parts of the CCD) then you can select this and all you need to do is then inform XREDUCE which of the input frames are which frame type. Check the known detectors under the Options menu in the main window.
If neither of these options is available to you then all isn’t lost as configuring XREDUCE is easy. All
you need to do is set some general options (press button General Options), define the CCD
characteristics (there’s graphical help available if you need to define any of the CCD geometries, check
under Options in the CCD Characteristics window) and then go on to organize your frames into
their types (button Manual Organization). To set the reduction running look under Setup and
Run.
No matter how you inform XREDUCE about your data you still have to follow pretty similar routes:
General Options and CCD Characteristics
windows)
Manual Organization or Using
FITS Headers windows)
Setup and Run window, where
your options will be restricted to those possible).Debiassing is done by two basic methods, either by subtracting bias frames or using the bias strips.
If you have bias frames then use them, if you don’t look for dark strips down the sides
of your data; these are the bias strips (have a look at Figure §1). If you have bias frames
and bias strips then use both (this is the zeroed master, offsetting to bias strips
option).
The reduction is run independently of the GUI and its output is kept in a log file xreduce.log, so exit
XREDUCE when you are finished (this is after you have accepted the options under Setup and Run)
and the reduction will continue.
One final piece of information concerns the nature of the “data frames” as they have been called so far.
These may be of any kind (as described in section §6) providing you have initialized the
CONVERT package before starting up XREDUCE. If you have not initialized CONVERT
then you will only be able to use data frames that are stored in the Starlink NDF format
and their names will consequently have a file type of ‘.sdf’. When using these names
in the GUI do include the ‘.sdf’ extension, this is contrary to how you would deal with
these names in “normal” NDF processing programs where you would not include the file
type.
If you have a ungraceful exit from XREDUCE you may have some CCDPACK and KAPPA processes left running. You will now have to kill these by hand. How you do this is system dependent. On BSD type systems (like Digital UNIX and Linux) try:
and on system V machines (Solaris) try:
and look for the processes named ccdpack_res and kapview_mon (and perhaps others, such as
ndfpack_mon). Get rid of these using the kill command followed by the process identifiers (usually
the number in the second column).
There is a command-line interface with similar abilities to XREDUCE if you do not have access to an X display (or prefer a command-line anyway) it is started using the command:
REDUCE it isn’t quite as capable as XREDUCE so you’ll have to work a bit harder. Consult the description in the appendix for a little more about this routine, but it’s probably worth trying it out and failing first.