2. What is DRAGONS

2.1. What it is

With a little bit of guidance from you, DRAGONS will reduce your Gemini data in a standard way, rapidly, with little fuss. With a bit more guidance from you, DRAGONS will let you optimize the reduction for your specific sources and science objectives.

DRAGONS is operated through the reduce command from the shell, or the Reduce class from a Python script. You choose. For clarity, we will refer to reduce only from now on, but it’s the same thing. A call to reduce activates the “Recipe System” which is what automates everything.

When reduce is called, the first FITS file is opened and identified, then the libraries of algorithms collected as “primitives” and “recipes” will be searched and the best matches will be selected and run on the data.

An important component of the DRAGONS automation infrastructure is the calibration manager. It is operated with the caldb command. (Again, there’s an API too.) This accesses a lightweight local database that will store information about your locally-processed calibrations. When a primitive is run and needs a calibration, the system will automatically identify the best matched processed calibration and use it, you do not have to specify it on the command line. (Though, you can if you really want to.)

Then there’s a series of utilities for sorting through the data and learning about the primitives and the recipes.

All of it uses astrodata which is used to open the FITS files. Once a file is opened with astrodata, it “knows about itself” and that’s how it can find the recipes, primitives, and calibration it needs.

Here’s what DRAGONS can look like from a user’s point view:

dataselect *.fits --tags=FLAT -o flat.lis
dataselect *.fits --expr="object='mycooltarget'" -o sci.lis
caldb init
reduce @flat.lis
caldb add *_flat.fits
reduce @sci.lis

The steps are:

  1. Create your lists of input data.

  2. Initialize your calibration database.

  3. Reduce your calibrations and upload the info to the database (the upload can be automated).

  4. Reduce your science, it will pick up the calibrations by itself.

As straightforward as a reduction can be, it can be customized to match your needs. The options to the primitives can be adjusted, the recipes themselves can be adjusted.

In this basic introduction to DRAGONS, we will explore all this and learn how to have DRAGONS do our bidding.

2.2. What it is not

DRAGONS is not a data analysis package. DRAGONS prepares the data for analysis but does not offer tools to do the analysis. Also, DRAGONS is also not a replacement for IRAF.

To inspect your data, to do any sort of analysis like photometry, measuring redshift, calculating equivalent width, etc, you will have to find another tool. DRAGONS does provide a primitive to display an image to ds9, but it will just display it. Similarly, there is a tool to plot a 1D spectrum, and again, it will just plot it, it not offer any measurement capabilities.

Any analysis-type tools are beyond the scope of DRAGONS.

2.3. Components in action

The diagram below illustrates how the components communicate with each other and in particular how the astrodata tags and descriptors are passed around to make decisions about the best matched recipe, primitive sets, and calibrations.

../../_images/DRAGONSActivityDiagram.png