IFU detector-based spectral extraction for point sources

stscijgbot-jp commented 3 years ago

Issue JP-2088 was created on JIRA by David Law:

There are multiple percent-level effects that will influence extracted spectra of point sources that cannot be corrected for with the currently-implemented method of building data cubes and then extracting spectra from those cubes. Indeed, building data cubes for known point sources isn't the best way of working with the data as it introduces unnecessary covariance.

We therefore propose a mechanism for extraction of point source spectra directly from the calibrated 2d detector data in a manner that can easily account for across-slice wavelength offsets, across-slice transmission losses, and the MRS spectral leak. Each of these effects is impossible to generically correct for in data cube space, but simple to address when extracting a point source directly from the 2d data.

This mechanism may at some point make sense to incorporate into the Optimal pipeline architecture; in the meantime we're looking for Cal WG feedback on the methodology and the potential for incorporating it into offline analysis tools.

Discussion scheduled for July 6 Cal WG, to be presented by Yannis Argyriou.