7. Using reduce

The reduce command (and the Reduce class if you are using the programming interface) is what drives DRAGONS. The command has a lot of options. We have used a few already. Let’s review those and show a few more.

First, to see the list of options available, use the -h flag:

reduce -h

7.1. Setting the suffix of the final outputs

It is not possible to set the name of the final output. This seems odd, but here is why. There might be more than one output, there can be dozens, it depends on the recipe. It is not reasonable to ask the user for a dozen different output strings on the command line, it also interferes with the automation.

We are still exploring solutions to this problem.

In the meantime, the user can set the suffix of the outputs. Each primitive has a meaningful suffix attached to it, for example _sourcesDetected for the primitive detectSources. The output of a reduce call will get the suffix assigned to the last primitive of the recipe.

If you wish to override that, you can set the --suffix option.

reduce @targets --suffix=_mytest

7.2. Customizing parameters

We have seen earlier how to check the available input parameters and their default settings for a given frame and primitive. The command showpars does that. For example:

showpars ../playdata/example1/N20160102S0363.fits normalizeFlat

The syntax to change the value of an input parameter is as follow:

reduce file.fits -p primitive:parameter=value

Exercise - “reduce” 1

White down the reduce command to reduce the flats from the demo (flats.lis) but this time set the scaling for normalizeFlat flat to mean. To avoid overwriting our “real” processed flat, let’s set the suffix to _exercise1.

Hint #1: cat flats.lis to get the name of a flat to use with showpars.

Hint #2: See the command used in the demo

[Solution]

7.3. Running non-default recipes

A recipe library often contains several recipes. One recipe in the library is set as the default library. If one wants to run a different library, its name can be specified on the command line using the -r flag.

As we have seen before to see the list of all available recipes, we can use the showrecipes command with the --all flag.

showrecipes ../playdata/example1/N20160102S0270.fits --all

Input file: /Users/klabrie/data/tutorials/niriimg_tutorial/playdata/example1/N20160102S0270.fits
Input tags: {'GEMINI', 'NORTH', 'NIRI', 'UNPREPARED', 'SIDEREAL', 'IMAGE', 'RAW'}
Recipes available for the input file:
   geminidr.niri.recipes.sq.recipes_IMAGE::alignAndStack
   geminidr.niri.recipes.sq.recipes_IMAGE::makeSkyFlat
   geminidr.niri.recipes.sq.recipes_IMAGE::reduce
   geminidr.niri.recipes.qa.recipes_IMAGE::makeSkyFlat
   geminidr.niri.recipes.qa.recipes_IMAGE::reduce
   geminidr.niri.recipes.sq.recipes_IMAGE::alignAndStack
   geminidr.niri.recipes.sq.recipes_IMAGE::makeSkyFlat
   geminidr.niri.recipes.sq.recipes_IMAGE::reduce

The strings sq and qa refer to the reduction mode. The qa mode, Quality Assessment, is used internally at Gemini. General users will be using the sq, Science Quality, recipes.

Warning

The last three “sq” recipes in the list above are really the “ql”, Quicklook, recipes. This a known bug (circa April 2023). The NIRI quicklook recipes are identical to the science recipes and are just “Python-imported” from the science module, and that import trips the current implementation of showrecipes.

The reduction mode is sq by default. To change that, one uses the --qa or soon --ql flags with reduce. We will be using the science quality recipes here so we do not need those flags in this version of workshop.

The syntax to select the specific recipe we want to use is:

reduce file1.fits file2.fits -r recipename   (optional --ql/--qa)

The -r option can also be used to primitives as we have seen elsewhere. Just type the name of the primitive instead of the recipe:

reduce file1.fits file2.fits -r primitivename

Another use of the -r option is to run personal recipes rather than the ones distributed with DRAGONS. We will show how that is done in the next chapter.

Exercise - “reduce” 2

Write the command to use the makeSkyFlat recipe on the science frames. Set the suffix to _skyflat.

Note that because the target fills the field-of-view of the science frames, the sky flat in this particular case will not be usable, but it’s okay, we are just exploring the reduce command-line here.

[Solution]

7.4. Overriding the calibration selection

If you wish to force DRAGONS to use a specific processed calibration, overriding the automatic selection, you can use the --user_cal flag. Here is a usage example.

reduce file1.fits file2.fits --user_cal processed_<cal>:my_cal.fits

Allowed values for “<cal>”: dark, bias, flat, arc, standard. Eg:

reduce @mylist.lis --user_cal processed_arc:my_special_arc.fits

Exercise - “reduce” 3

In the demo, we reduced the flux standard as follow:

reduce @stdstar.lis -p darkCorrect:do_cal=skip

Modify this command to allow the dark correction to use the processed dark we used for the science frame, N20160102S0423_dark.fits.

[Solution]