ZAP -- Enhanced PCA Sky Subtraction for Integral Field Spectroscopy

By K. Soto, S. Lilly, R. Bacon, J. Richard, Simon Conseil. 2016

194 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We introduce Zurich Atmosphere Purge (ZAP), an approach to sky subtraction based on principal component analysis (PCA) that we have developed for the Multi Unit Spectrographic Explorer (MUSE) integral field spectrograph. ZAP employs filtering and data segmentation to enhance the inherent capabilities of PCA for sky subtraction. Extensive testing shows that ZAP reduces sky emission residuals while robustly preserving the flux and line shapes of astronomical sources. The method works in a variety of observational situations from sparse fields with a low density of sources to filled fields in which the target source fills the field of view. With the inclusion of both of these situations the method is generally applicable to many different science cases and should also be useful for other instrumentation. ZAP is available for download at this http URL

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Ecology, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f36edaee31b681226d6fd50665f7cfb73a7f029a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. P. Hopkins
2. R. Dav'e
3. L. Hernquist
4. R. Bouwens
5. R. Somerville
6. Joop Schaye
7. Simon D. M. White
8. J. Richard

In Ecology

1. Joop Schaye
2. J. Brinchmann
3. J. Richard
4. R. Bacon

In Global and Planetary Change

1. Joop Schaye
2. J. Brinchmann
3. J. Richard
4. R. Bouwens

Citations in the corpus

• The MUSE Hubble Ultra Deep Field Survey: I. Survey description, data reduction and source detection (2017, methodology): “We then used ZAP (Soto et al. 2016), the principal component analysis enhanced sky subtraction software developed for MUSE datacubes.”
• GASP. I. Gas Stripping Phenomena in Galaxies with MUSE (2017, methodology): “However, experimentation withZAP shows that it has to be used with caution, especially if there may be faint extended Hα emission in the sky spaxels thatitcan aggressively “clean.””