SINGS Team Meeting — Baltimore, April 20, 2023 JDS 1
CUBISMor
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the
Cube
J.D. Smith
SINGS Team Meeting — Baltimore, April 20, 2023 JDS 2
Today’s Menu
SINGS IRS Program RefresherCUBISM — your friendly
neighborhood cube-builder.From here to there
Assembling cubes from BCD inputs....and back again
Spectral maps and line extraction.Leftovers — casserole anyone?
SINGS Team Meeting — Baltimore, April 20, 2023 JDS 3
SINGS IRS Program
LL radial strips: 4–16x11 steps, both slits at once: 76.2 hrs; 936.7 MB.
SL: 1x9, subslits SL1 & SL2 pointed separately: Nuclear: 16.1 hrs; 224.6 MB. Extra-Nuclear: 36.6 hrs; 224.6 MB.
SH & LH : 3x5 (SH: 2 cycles): Nuclear:
61.3 hours; 561.6 MB.
Extra-Nuclear: 62.1 hours;549.1 MB.
SINGS Team Meeting — Baltimore, April 20, 2023 JDS 4
Mapping Data
The IRS spectral maps range in size from 15 to 176 DCE’s per slit.
Each galaxy’s nucleus is covered by ~85 individual slit pointings.
SL maps will offer “satellite” wings, since each sub-slit is mapped sequentially over the same area.
LL maps will have non-uniform sub-slitcoverage.
SINGS Team Meeting — Baltimore, April 20, 2023 JDS 5
Background
CUBISM is a tool for constructing spectral cubes (,, — one pixel per location/wavelength) from both low and hi-res IRS spectral mapping data sets, the release-form of which will consist of: The Cube-Builder Back End. CubeView and CubeProject Interface
Components.
Written entirely in IDL†, drawing on existing elements of SCOREX.
†Except for one auto-compiled, fault-tolerant component to be written in C for speed. Currently targets: IDLv5.5. Will target: IDLv5.6.
SINGS Team Meeting — Baltimore, April 20, 2023 JDS 6
Development Synopsis
Low-Res High-Res, progressing through three stages:1. Rough cube, no de-fringing, error weighting,
adjustable grid spacing, or refined image combination.
2. Proper weighting for combination from pixels at different pointings and spectral orders.
3. Possible additions: tunable grid spacing, optimized slit-image combination.
Simulated data was/is critical. SIM data progressed alongside the cube
builder to provide increasingly robust checks.
SINGS Team Meeting — Baltimore, April 20, 2023 JDS 7
Cube Builder
Assemble cubes directly from BCD data set, minimizing interpolation — pixels take shortest route possible from BCD to cube.
Single cube pixel: Data from different pointings (e.g. half-slit
offsets) Data from different orders on the array (bonus
order/high resolution modules) Provides “pixel accountability.”
Controls error “blooming” caused by unnecessary correlating operations (e.g. fractional pixel shifts or rotation).
SINGS Team Meeting — Baltimore, April 20, 2023 JDS 8
Cube Builder
Permits flexible grid spacing. Will accommodate pointing uncertainties
and geometric distortions in the slit image (if measured).
Allows Resolution vs. S/N tradeoffs — exploring alternative cube “sky” grid spacing.
Flux–conserving, drizzle-like (with many more clip operations, but unit drop size).
Separate cube foreach sub-slit.
Drizzle
SINGS Team Meeting — Baltimore, April 20, 2023 JDS 9
Cube Building — Details
1. A few to dozens of BCD’s are read into a cube “project”. Headers are fully parsed.
2. Logical row/column numbers, plate scale, slit and slit dimensions stored for locating samples on the mapping grid.
3. Calibration set object loaded from disk Cached order position, wavelength solution,
PR clipping areas and polygons, etc. User-selectable. New aperture clips
automatically stored.
SINGS Team Meeting — Baltimore, April 20, 2023 JDS 10
Cube Building — Details
4. Build order and aperture selected (normalized “slit-length”, linearly varying across order).
5. Spatial dimensions of the cube calculated from map step coordinates & slit size.
6. Pixel-based WAVSAMP samples obtained from calibration object for chosen aperture.
7. Merge data for combining wavelength-overlapping orders pre-computed from order(s) selected and calibration inputs.
SINGS Team Meeting — Baltimore, April 20, 2023 JDS 11
Cube Building — Details
8. Wavelength dimension of the cube computed from merge data.
9. Accounting list: BCD pixel Cube pixels, with overlap areas. Slow to compute: cached (big). Associated with BCD record (compute individually).
10. Each order and each PR considered in turn. Partial pixels de-rotated (slit-rotation, position-angle deviations within map, etc.), offset and clipped to sky grid (can’t trust pointing reconstruction).
SINGS Team Meeting — Baltimore, April 20, 2023 JDS 12
Cube Building — Details
11. Accounting cube filled and (possibly) merged with existing accounts.
12. Reverse accounting histogram constructed from merged accounts: Cube Pixel BCD Pixels.
13. There’s no step 13.14. Reverse accounts used to combine
appropriate fractions of contributing BCD pixels in cube. Total area also accumulated.
15. Area-weighted cube complete.
SINGS Team Meeting — Baltimore, April 20, 2023 JDS 13
Cube Builder
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Maps and 1D Spectra
Both spectral maps (e.g. [Ne II], PAH 11.3µm) and (non-BQD) 1D spectral extractions (e.g. resolved nucleus) can be made directly from the cube.
Flexible map creation: arbitrary band-pass.Simple square aperture, expanding
aperture, or full parallel aperture photometry 1D extractions: Can be tailored for changing extraction
environment. Potential for automatic aperture selection
(brightest knot).
SINGS Team Meeting — Baltimore, April 20, 2023 JDS 15
Archival Format
Discussions with FITS spec-writers led to: FITS Cube/Error Cube/Flag Cube in
subsequent FITS Extensions (-headers — STScI convention).
Wavelength map for each cube plane in a single column of a binary table in a separate extension, pointed to by PS3_{0,1} with CTYPE3: ‘WAVE-TAB'.
Wavelength sampling still unresolved: Linearize? Small or vanishing overlap…
Other archive product formats TBD.
SINGS Team Meeting — Baltimore, April 20, 2023 JDS 16
Archival Format
SINGS Team Meeting — Baltimore, April 20, 2023 JDS 17
From SIM to Cube
SINGS Team Meeting — Baltimore, April 20, 2023 JDS 18
From SIM to Cube
SINGS Team Meeting — Baltimore, April 20, 2023 JDS 19
From SIM to Cube
SINGS Team Meeting — Baltimore, April 20, 2023 JDS 20
From SIM to Cube
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Interface
CubeView & CubeProject — defer to demo.
Fundamental Interface Doctrine: All cube operations can be performed without the interface (scripting): E.g. after 100 cubes have been delivered,
the calibration data gets a major update: re-do them all by hand? No, simply script it.
SINGS Team Meeting — Baltimore, April 20, 2023 JDS 22
CUBISM Schedule
How we’re doing: Overall, quite well. Cube improvements more involved,
unexpected “deeper” issues discovered interface lagged.
February, 2002: First internal alpha team release.
December, 2004: First full release to the SSC (to coincide with first data cubes available), with SSC-scientist level documentation.
SINGS Team Meeting — Baltimore, April 20, 2023 JDS 23
The Leftovers
MIPS SED.Assorted cube improvements
planned.Interface gravy. Unknowns:
Fringing.Deep cube building issues.Questions and uncertainties for the
SSC.
SINGS Team Meeting — Baltimore, April 20, 2023 JDS 24
MIPS Coordination
MIPS SED mode can produce spectral maps too! In coordination with the MIPS team, MIPS
SED data will also be processed and displayed in CUBISM.
Analogous to a single Low-Res IRS order (e.g. SL1), but with more involved detector issues (offsets, varying gains, etc.).
MIPS-specific issues will be factored out (G. Bendo).
SINGS Team Meeting — Baltimore, April 20, 2023 JDS 25
Cube Improvements
Position-based offsets: bizarre combinations, like SL1_cen, followed by SL_cen at another epoch (and PA). Exact telescope/calibration agreement on slit center required.
Position optimization — treating reconstructed positions in aggregate.
Full error treatment, and alternative BCD pixels Cube pixel combination choices (area weighted: A, A2, A2t, clipped, median, etc.)
SINGS Team Meeting — Baltimore, April 20, 2023 JDS 26
Cube Improvements
Auto-aperture selection (guided by SIMIII).
Noise floor for data rejection.User definable bad pixels.Updated and optimal extractions:
Expanding aperture. In-place sky removal ala parallel aperture
photometry.
Images stacked according to line fit (e.g. de-blending line pair).
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Interface Additions
Pixel-account querying and feedback.User-definable bad pixels.Saved extraction band-pass sets.Graphical manual/auto spectral
aperture selector.Circular aperture, expanding cube
aperture extraction selector.
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Spectral vs. Spatial
Pixel-level ambiguity between spatial & spectral resolution (slicers undersample).
Plan: carry 1n & 2n for comparison.
SINGS Team Meeting — Baltimore, April 20, 2023 JDS 29
Fringing
IRS has fringes (<15% peak-peak) in both high-resolution modules at R~50, originating in the detector substrate.
Photometric accuracy of line maps impacted.
Multiple de-fringing efforts underway. 1D vs. 2D de-fringing, in or after the IRS pipeline?
CUBISM favors 2D de-fringers, but will evaluate all options when the smoke clears after launch.
SINGS Team Meeting — Baltimore, April 20, 2023 JDS 30
Questions & Uncertainties
For the SSC: Flux calibration: different for extended
objects (sensitive to slit throughput function)?
Reformulated WAVSAMP: pixel-based? Error plane reliability and simulations.
Wait and see: Pointing inaccuracies: Drift, Reconstruction
errors. Background subtraction strategy (SV).
Fin
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Raw SCORE (SH Prototype) Atmospheric Emission Spectrum