What is Figaro?

Figaro is a general-purpose data reduction package. Many people find it ideal for reducing spectroscopic data, but it also has powerful image and data cube manipulation facilities. The package was developed by Keith Shortridge, originally at Caltech and later at the Anglo-Australian Observatory (AAO). The version described here, Portable Figaro, is released and supported by Starlink.

Portable Figaro can be run in a command-oriented way from the Unix shell (usually a shell similar to the C shell). There is a second command line interface, ICL, from which Figaro can be run. ICL has some advantages over Unix shells, because it has floating point variables and can communicate with the ADAM parameter system that underlies Portable Figaro. ICL also avoids a lot of quirks in command syntax due to Unix shell meta-characters.

By default Figaro accesses data files in Starlink's NDF data format. However, it can also access a number of different data formats, including Figaro's old DST format, FITS and IRAF. Most Starlink packages can access the same range of data formats, and consequently Figaro can inter-operate with them. Earlier versions of Figaro supported a different and more restricted range of data formats. The current facilities are available in Portable Figaro version 5.1 and higher.

From version 5.3, Portable Figaro incorporates the Specdre package, which is used for spectroscopy data reduction and analysis. It includes cube manipulation, arc line axis (wavelength) calibration, re-sampling, and spectral fits.

From version 5.5, Portable Figaro incorporates the Twodspec package, which is used for longslit spectroscopy data reduction and analysis. It provides tools for calibration/correction of data and fitting of 2-D longslit arrays, either automatically or as an interactive process. These tools also offer a number of options for generating hard copy output of the resulting fits.