Object Finding

This document describes how the code identifies objects within the slits/orders.

Overview

Object identification is a challenging process to code in general. The challenges are that one must consider a large dynamic range between bright telluric and spectrophotometric standards and faint continuum or emission-line sources. When this is coupled with very short slits, the presence of both positive and negative traces (when image differencing), and the detection of objects on specific orders (for echelle spectra), many corner cases can arise. Our general philosophy has been to try to create an algorithm that is fully automated and detects the most probable sources (\({\rm SNR} > 10\sigma\)). The user has the option to lower this threshold and/or request that specific objects be manually extracted.

Algorithm

The algorithm described below attempts to identify the peak location of objects on the slit/order as well as measure an initial FWHM of the object. This FWHM then informs the width of the mask around this object trace in global sky-subtraction, as well as the width of the region that PypeIt uses for local sky-subtraction.

In a standard run, the approach to object finding adopted is:

  1. Perform a first global sky-subtraction without any masking of objects.

  2. Run the object finding code for the first time.

  3. Create a mask indicating object free sky pixels using the locations of the objects identified.

  4. Perform a second global sky-subtraction with the objects masked.

  5. Run the object finding code a second time.

These steps are performed by pypeit.find_objects.FindObjects.run().

The automated object finding algorithm is objs_in_slit(). It performs the following steps:

  1. Rectify the sky-subtracted frame.

  2. Create a mask by sigma clipping (median stat) down the spectral dimension to further reject CRs. This could mask bright emission lines.

  3. Sum over the spectral direction but using the sigma clipping resulting in a vector representing counts as a function of spatial slit/order. Compute the formal S/N ratio of this collapsed image using the noise model.

  4. Smooth this 1d vector which represents S/N vs spatial slit/order position.

  5. Search for peaks in this S/N ratio vector above the threshold snr_thresh. This is the quantity that is shown as the histogram in the object finding QA plots (link an example!). The default value is snr_thresh = 10.

  6. Objects that are within find_trim_edge of the slit edges will be removed.

  7. Of the good objects (i.e. not close to the edge), the number of objects returned will be further restricted to a maximum number with the highest S/N ratio. Note that this maximum is set by maxnumber_sci parameter for science exposures, versus the maxnumber_std for standard exposures. For multislit the defaults are maxnumber_sci = 10 and maxnumber_std = 5. For echelle spectrographs with short slits they are maxnumber_sci = 2 and maxnumber_std = 1.

Parameters

This reduction step is guided by the FindObjPar Keywords.

These are parameters one may modify to improve performance. While we have tried to tune these for each spectrograph, particular use cases may require further modification.

snr_thresh

The most common parameter modifications we recommend are to adjust snr_thresh to enable the identification of fainter sources (at the risk of false positives). Reasonable results have been obtained with snr_thresh as low as 5.0.

To make this modification, add the following to your PypeIt Reduction File:

[reduce]
    [[findobj]]
        snr_thresh = 5.0

maxnumber_sci

The QA plot (see linked) clearly indicates the objects that are being excluded due to proximity to the edges, and/or the maxnumber parameter. These can also be adjusted, for example for an echelle spectrum with three objects on the slit where one wants to work closer to slit edges:

[reduce]
    [[findobj]]
        maxnumber_sci = 3
        find_trim_edge = 3,3

find_min_max

If your spectrum covers only a minority of the detector (less than 50%), you may need to set this using the find_min_max parameter. This includes odd tilts of the grating, data cut off to the blue and objects with spectral breaks, like with high-z quasars or galaxies.

You can restrict the spectral region that the automated object finding collapses out to search for objects via

[reduce]
    [[findobj]]
        find_min_max = 1600, 2048

This will only collapse out spectral pixels 1600-2048 when computing the 1d SNR vs spatial position vector. The best way to choose these pixels is to run PypeIt without it set. Then run pypeit_show_2dspec to view the sky-subtracted image and decide which pixels to use for object finding. Then re-run PypeIt.