Reducing SCUBA data

At the telescope, SCUBA data is reduced during observations with ORAC-DR. ORAC-DR can also be used offline for automated reduction. It makes use of SURF, which can also be used for more interactive reduction.

• ORAC-DR User Manual: This reduction 'pipeline' can do reductions in realtime or offline with speed and ease. The manual offers an easy introduction.
  More extensive information at:
  • ORAC-DR homepage
  • a general description of ORAC-DR

• The SURF manual: The SCUBA User Reduction Facility. The standard program to interactively reduce SCUBA data.
  Cookbooks for reducing SCUBA data :
  • Photometry. See also these additional notes.
  • Mapping. See also these additional notes.

• Polarimetry data reduction:
  • Photometry data
  • Jiggle-map data
• The SCUBA calibration page: Contains opacity data from the JCMT Water Vapour Monitor and CSO 225GHz Tau fits as well as information on secondary calibrators, instrument gains, tau ratios etc.

• Very useful analysis and display packages:
  • GAIA A very, very good program you should definitely know (based on Skycat) It can read and manipulate the output from SURF and ORAC-DR. Easy to handle GUI with tons of tools for analysing (e.g. determination of noise in scan maps) and displaying data and much more. Highly recommended.
    
    
  • KAPPA A commandline based tool to display and analyse reduced data. Almost organic to SURF. About 180 general-purpose commands for image processing, data visualisation, and manipulation of the standard Starlink data format - the NDF.
    
    
  • FIGARO An independent data reduction tool, useful for spectroscopy but now deprecated for general use. Now superceded by KAPPA.
    
    
  • CONVERT A file Format-conversion Package. Converts almost everything. E.g. ndf2fits for conversion of SCUBA data to Fits format.
    
    
  • IRAF A general purpose software system from NOAO for the reduction and analysis of astronomical data.
    
    
  • GRAPHIC Part of the Gildas Software which can be used to inspect and analyse data after conversion to fits format. You may have to type setenv PATH /jac_sw/gag/linux-intel/bin:$PATH first.