MMT/Hectospec: data reduction and common problems

Benjamin Weiner, MMT Observatory

The Hectospec fiber spectrograph on the MMT telescope obtains 300 fiber spectra at a time over a 1 degree field of view. This page is intended to compile some notes on data reduction and issues that occasionally cause problems in reduction.

Resources:

MMT Observatory
Hectospec spectrograph
Hectospec observers manual, includes instructions on making fiber configurations with xfitfibs
HSRED reduction software, uses IDL

How to run HSRED

See the HSRED page for how to run HSRED v2 using a wrapper to run all the reduction steps. I also strongly recommend reading the older HSRED instructions. These tell you what the individual steps are doing.

Common problems

Fits files that don't belong
Mix of 270 and 600-line grating data
Missing skyflats
No standard stars on config?
Restarting a reduction halfway through
Detecting completed but problematic data

Fits files that don't belong

HSRED will usually attempt to reduce all the *.fits files in your directory. If there are fits files that it should not touch, it will run into problems. Generally, every *.fits data file should have an accompanying *_map file, a text file that describes the fiber assignments. If there is no map file, an error will occur in HS_MAPTOPLUG.

Move all skycam fits files to a subdirectory. See the prune_skycam_600.sh file linked below.
Move all extraneous files away. In particular, if you have any "ring250*.fits" files, remove those.
You should usually have only bias, comp, dark, domeflat, sflat, and science images. The science images will have the name of your configuration. (Possibly also images of other fields like a standard? but typically just your data.)

Mix of 270 and 600-line grating data

Hectospec has two gratings, 270-line and 600-line. The 270 is more commonly used. If your directory has a mix of 270 and 600 data, the reduction will run and may complete, but the data will look terrible. The most common issue is that there are some 600-line comps (arc lamps) or flats mixed in with your comps and flats.

Run this script: sh prune_skycam_600.sh linked here: prune_skycam_600.sh in your data directory. This will find all *skycam.fits files and move them to a tmp_skycam subdirectory, and look in the image headers to find any files with DISPERSE = 600_gpm and move those to a tmp_600grating directory. It uses pyraf to list the image headers to a file.

If you don't have pyraf, you can use anything that looks at the fits header of extension 1 or 2 for the DISPERSE keyword to find the files with 600_gpm. If you are reducing 600-line data and need to get rid of the 270-line files, just change all the 600 references to 270.

Note that if there are data with multiple wavelength settings (only likely with the 600-line grating), you also need to sort those into one wavelength setting per reduction directory.

Missing skyflats

If there are no skyflats, HSRED will balk and issue an error partway through the reduction. Sometimes there may not be any skyflats named sflat.*.fits in your data directory, if for example the weather was bad at sunset.

Borrow skyflats from another night within the same Hectospec run. Either copy the sflat.*.fits files into your directory, or if you have an already reduced directory with sky flats, you can just copy the list of files: e.g.
```
  mkdir 2016.1001/lists
  cp 2016.1005/lists/sflat.list 2016.1001/lists/
  
```
If you only have one night of data and there are no skyflats included, then contact the TDC (Telescope Data Center) at SAO, from which you normally download your data, and they should be able to give you access to some flats.

No standard stars on config

If you try to reduce a configuration with the /uberextract option to get flux calibration, and you don't have any standard stars on the config, HSRED will complain. If you did put F stars on the config, you need to add them and their magnitudes to HSRED's list of standard stars in $HSRED_DIR/etc/standardstars.dat, described at the older HSRED instructions.

Add the standard stars to standardstars.dat and rerun. If you didn't have any F stars, don't use /uberextract. Next time, select some standard stars, e.g. from SDSS use the SPECTROPHOTOMETRIC_STANDARD flag and some magnitude criteria (about 17th mag?).

Restarting a reduction halfway through

I find that if the pipeline crashes for some reason, you fix the problem, and try to run it again without making changes, the end data are often garbled - this may include bad sky subtractions, or a SNR vs magnitude plot with a lot of scatter. One issue is that HSRED detects whether files have been processed and doesn't redo them, e.g. if you've run HS_CALIBPROC and made all of the files in the calibration subdirectory, running HS_CALIBPROC again will not reprocess them. To avoid this, start over from the beginning with a new rerun number. Your first run will probably be number 0000. You can start over by giving the optional command rerun='0100' (or 0200, 0300, etc) to commands such as HS_PIPELINE_WRAP, HS_CALIBPROC, HS_EXTRACT, HS_REDUCE1D.

Detecting completed but problematic data

One tool for checking whether your data are sensible is to make a SNR vs magnitude plot. You can do this by running HS_SNR on the spHect output file. In IDL, run commands like these:

fname = 'reduction/0000/spHect-2016.1001_1.fits'
lam = mrdfits(fname,0)
object =  mrdfits(fname,1)
plugmap = mrdfits(fname,5)
hs_snr, lam, object, plugmap, snr=snr

This should pop up a plot with continuum SNR measured from the spectra vs. magnitudes from your input catalog. If your magnitudes are good, there should be a decent correlation with modest scatter. For galaxies with SDSS photometry, I typically see a number like SNR ~ 2-3 at r=21 in about 1-2 hours of Hectospec exposure. If there are a few outliers, it may indicate problems with some of your targets - for example, low surface brightness objects will be low SNR outliers for their magnitude. If it's a total scatterplot with no correlation, then something may have gone wrong in the reduction. This has happened to me a couple of times with the mixed 270 and 600-line files, or with a reduction that crashed halfway through and was restarted without a new rerun.