splot with a wavelength array instead of dispersion solution

Adam wrote on Dec 15, 2008

Hi, I'd like to use IRAF to plot the spectrum extracted from the SPEXTOOL package. It extracts data in a FITS format where there are 3 arrays with the same number of elements: a wavelength array, a data array, and a variance array.

How can I plot this / interact with this data in IRAF? So far the only solution I've come up with is outputting the data to text and using rspectext to convert it to an IRAF formatted spectrum, but this solution is inelegant and fails for my spectra because of the large wavelength coverage and limited header size. Is there any way to deal with this data in its current format?

Thanks,
Adam

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Francisco Valdes wrote on Dec 15, 2008

I've long wanted to support formats with separate wavelength and flux vectors in text or binary tables (is the SPEXTOOL format FITS binary tables?). But currently the main spectral format for IRAF is an image with a WCS for the wavelengths. The only other options you could explore are the TABLES package (including the tables graphic task) or maybe the IGI graphics package where you write mongo-like command scripts.

Yours,
Frank Valdes

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Adam wrote on Dec 15, 2008

OK, thanks, I'll have a look.

Adam

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Last post on Dec 15, 2008