ORAC-DR: A generic data reduction pipeline infrastructure

ORAC-DR is a general purpose data reduction pipeline system designed to be instrument and observatory agnostic. The pipeline works with instruments as varied as infrared integral field units, imaging arrays and spectrographs, and sub-millimeter heterodyne arrays & continuum cameras. This paper describes the architecture of the pipeline system and the implementation of the core infrastructure. We finish by discussing the lessons learned since the initial deployment of the pipeline system in the late 1990s.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure, accepted for publication in Astronomy and Computin

Python 3 at the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope

The LSST software systems make extensive use of Python, with almost all of it initially being developed solely in Python 2. Since LSST will be commissioned when Python 2 is end-of-lifed it is critical that we have all our code support Python 3 before commissioning begins. Over the past year we have made significant progress in migrating the bulk of the code from the Data Management system onto Python 3. This poster presents our migration methodology, and the current status of the port, with our eventual aim to be running completely on Python 3 by early 2018. We also discuss recent modernizations to our Python codebase

Removing sky contributions from SCUBA data

The Submillimetre Common-User Bolometer Array (SCUBA) is a new continuum camera operating on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. It consists of two arrays of bolometric detectors; a 91 pixel 350/450 micron array and a 37 pixel 750/850 micron array. Both arrays can be used simultaneously and have a field-of-view of approximately 2.4 arcminutes in diameter on the sky. Ideally, performance should be limited solely by the photon noise from the sky background at all wavelengths of operation. However, observations at submillimetre wavelengths are hampered by ``sky-noise'' which is caused by spatial and temporal fluctuations in the emissivity of the atmosphere above the telescope. These variations occur in atmospheric cells that are larger than the array diameter, and so it is expected that the resultant noise will be correlated across the array and, possibly, at different wavelengths. In this paper we describe our initial investigations into the presence of sky-noise for all the SCUBA observing modes, and explain our current technique for removing it from the data.Comment: 11 pages, 16 figures, Proc SPIE vol 335