Plotting Spectra with IRAF

I don’t like IRAF, but it seems to have a lot of functionalities to plot and fit spectra. The Space Telescope Science Institute has a lot of good software for this. They have the Space Telescope Science Data Analysis System (STSDAS). This is a software package to reduce and analyze astronomical data. This includes the Interactive Graphics Interpreter: igi (Levay 1992). Below I describe the process that I had to do to be able to produce a figure with the STSDAS task igi with pyraf.

The installation:

I am currently using pyraf for Python2. I installed a while ago with the Ureka also from the Space Telescope Science Institute. I don’t know if Ureka dies come with the STSDAS packages but this was actually surprisingly easy to install following these instructions.

wspectext

Converting to text file before I can use igi for some reason. I need to convert it without the header. In Python importing from pyraf iraf

iraf.onedspec.wspectext(filename, output=source+'spectra.txt', header=False)

Using igi

Work on progress …

Manual is good here: http://stsdas.stsci.edu/download/docs/IGIManual.pdf

I want to try something like explain in the FAQ Can I automate igi graphics using a native python script? here.

It is in stsdas.graphics.stplot

remember to be in xgterm as defined in my .bashrc

splot fitting

http://iraf.noao.edu/iraf/ftp/iraf/docs/script.pdf

See the post on Semi-Auto Fitting with IRAF.

To save images in iraf with the .snap eps and .gflush.

In Python:

from pyraf import iraf