Optimal Techniques in Two‐dimensional Spectroscopy: Background Subtraction for the 21st Century

In two-dimensional spectrographs, the optical distortions in the spatial and dispersion directions produce variations in the sub-pixel sampling of the background spectrum. Using knowledge of the camera distortions and the curvature of the spectral features, one can recover information regarding the background spectrum on wavelength scales much smaller than a pixel. As a result, one can propagate this better-sampled background spectrum through inverses of the distortion and rectification transformations, and accurately model the background spectrum in two-dimensional spectra for which the distortions have not been removed (i.e. the data have not been rebinned/rectified). The procedure, as outlined in this…