Data from slit spectra allow the determination and subtraction of the background sky using information from regions near the object of interest. Background subtraction may also apply to cases of scattered light though other techniques for scattered light removal may be more appropriate. The APEXTRACT package provides for determining the background level at each wavelength (line or column along the dispersion axis) from a set of regions and extrapolating and subtracting the background at each pixel extracted from the object profile. The type of background used during extraction is specified by the parameter background. If the value "none" is used then no background is subtracted and any background parameters defined for an aperture are ignored. If the value is "average", "median", "minimum" or "fit" then a background is determined, including a variance estimate when using variance weighted extraction (see apvariance), and the subtracted background spectrum may be output if the extras parameter is set.
The basic aperture definition structure used in the APEXTRACT package includes associated background regions and fitting parameters. The background regions are specified by a list of colon delimited ranges defined relative to the center of the aperture. There are generally two ranges, one on each side of the object, though one sided or more complex sets may be used to avoid contaminated or missing parts of the slit. The default ranges are defined by the parameter b_sample. Often the ranges are better set graphically using a cursor by invoking the 'b' option of the aperture editor.
If the background type is "average", "median", or "minimum" then pixels occupying these regions are averaged, medianed, or the minimum found to produce a single background level for all object pixels at each wavelength. Note that the "average" choice does not exclude any pixels which may yield a background contaminated by cosmic rays. The "median" or "minimum" is recommended instead.
If the background type is "fit" then a function is fit to the pixels in the background regions using the ICFIT options (see icfit). The parameter b_naverage may be used to compute averages or medians of groups or all of the points within each sample region. The fit is defined by a function type b_function; one of legendre polynomial, chebyshev polynomial, linear spline, or cubic spline, and function order b_order (number of polynomial terms or spline pieces). An interactive rejection of grossly deviant points from the fit may also be used. The fitted function can define a constant, sloped, or higher order background for the object pixels.
Note that the background setting function, the 'b' key in apedit, may be used to set the background regions for all the background options but it will always show the result of a fit regardless of the background type.
After determining a background by averaging, medianing, minimizing, or fitting, a box car smoothing step may be applied. The box car size is given by the parameter skybox. When the number of available background pixels is small, due to a small slit for instance, the noise introduced to the extracted object spectrum may be unsatisfactorily large. By smoothing the background one can reduce the noise when the background consists of a smooth continuum. The trade-off, however, is that near sharp features the smoothing will smear the features out and give a poorer subtraction of these features. One could extract both the object and background separately and apply a background smoothing separately using other image processing tools. However, this is not possible for variance weighted extraction because of the intimate connection between the background levels, the profile determination, and the variance estimates based on both. Thus, this smoothing feature is included.
The background determined by the methods outlined above is actually subtracted as a separate step during extraction. The background is also used during profile fitting when cleaning or using variance weighted extraction. See apvariance and approfile for further discussion.
approfile apvariance apdefault icfit apall apsum,