Calibration

Calibration files

Auxiliary data used in DRP algorithms are called calibration data. This includes both on-sky data (that is not of the astronomical target itself), daytime calibration frames, and other sub-component metadata. Metadata is non-image information that will typically come from the header of raw FITS files, or from IRIS, and/or the adaptive optics system via the observatory telemetry service. The NFIRAOS Science Calibration Unit (NSCU) will include a calibration system that will facilitate the taking of daytime calibration frames, such as arc lamp spectra, white light flat field images, and pinhole grids for measuring distortion. The following table summarizes the required calibration files necessary for the Data Reduction Software.

Notes about the table: Note: * = SPEC only, PTG = pointing, D-Map = Distortion Map, Env = Environmental, DTC = Daytime calibration, NTC = Nightime calibration.

Calibration frames

Name

Reference Type

Source

Algorithms

Atm. Dispersion Residual

Metadata

IRIS ADC

Atmospheric Correction

Arc lamp spectra*

CAL (2D)

IRIS DTC (NSCU)

Wavelength solution

Bad pixel map

CAL (2D)

IRIS DTC

Correction of detector artifacts

Dark Frame

CAL (2D)

IRIS DTC and NTC

Dark subtraction

Env metadata

Metadata

ESW, FITS header

All

Fiber image

CAL (2D, 3D)

IRIS DTC (NSCU)

PSF Calibration

Flux calibration star

CAL (2D, 3D)

IRIS On-sky

Extract Star, Remove Absorption Lines

Instrument config

Metadata

ESW, FITS header

All

Lenslet scan*

Rect Matrix CAL (2D)

IRIS DTC (NSCU)

Spectral Extraction

NFIRAOS config

Metadata

ESW, FITS header

All

Pinhole Grid (D-Map)

CAL (2D)

IRIS DTC (NSCU)

Field distortion correction

PSF metadata

Metadata

ESW, FITS header

PSF calibration

PSF star

CAL (2D, 3D)

IRIS on-sky

PSF calibration

Sky frame

CAL (2D, 3D)

IRIS on-sky

Sky-subtraction

Telescope config PTG

Metadata

ESW, FITS header

All
Real time Calibration frames

Name

Reference Type

Source

Algorithms

Atm. Dispersion Residual

Metadata

IRIS ADC

Atmospheric Correction

Arc lamp spectra*

CAL (2D)

IRIS DTC (NSCU)

Wavelength solution

Bad pixel map

CAL (2D)

IRIS DTC

Correction of detector artifacts

Dark Frame

CAL (2D)

IRIS DTC and NTC

Dark subtraction

Env metadata

Metadata

ESW, FITS header

All

Instrument config

Metadata

ESW, FITS header

All

NFIRAOS config

Metadata

ESW, FITS header

All

Sky frame

CAL (2D, 3D)

IRIS on-sky

Sky-subtraction

Telescope config PTG

Metadata

ESW, FITS header

All

Access calibration files via the Calibration Reference Data System (CRDS)

The Calibration Reference Data System (CRDS) is a set of tools developed by Space Telescope to organize and retrieve calibration reference files, e.g. flat frames, dark frames, for JWST and HST. When stpipe is executing a pipeline, it can automatically connect to the JWST CRDS server and get the right flat based on the metadata in the header of the data FITS files. The logic necessary to choose the right file is encoded in text files. Those configuration files and the actual calibration FITS files are also cached locally so that the CRDS client library works even without any connection to a central server.

We have created a CRDS cache folder in the Github repository https://github.com/oirlab/tmt-crds-cache, this includes in the mappings/tmt folder the metadata for IRIS and the rules to choose the right flat-field and dark-current frame, for now there are only dummy rules but this can be easily customized querying the metadata in the input file.

Currently we do not have any CRDS server running, but the users can download the CRDS cache locally and use it anyway, see the Getting started documentation.

Also, the CRDS client library needs to have minimal knowledge about metadata for TMT, therefore we maintain a fork of that library which simply adds a submodule dedicated to IRIS, https://github.com/oirlab/tmt-crds, it is quite easy to upgrade this to newer releases of CRDS by Space Telescope.

If TMT decided to use CRDS as their Data Management System, it would leverage the extensive set of tools and documentation available and would not require modifications to stpipe; otherwise, we will implement support for the DMS API into (our own fork of) stpipe.

Structure of the files in CRDS

The complete documentation of CRDS is available from Space Telescope, in this section we will provide a quick overview of the structure of the files in the CRDS cache we use for TMT/IRIS.

The files are all text files and have a hierarchical structure and the root is a .pmap file, in our case it is tmt_0001.pmap, this file defines the observatory and it is used to switch between different versions of the instrument model. In fact when we define the environment variables for CRDS we specify CRDS_CONTEXT to be the filename of the .pmap file we want to use. This makes it very easy to switch back and forth between different versions of the calibration files.

At the bottom of the .pmap file we point to all the different instruments of the current observatory and the specific version of their definition files. For now we only have tmt_iris_0003.imap.

The .imap file defines what kind of calibration files are available in CRDS. For example we can have DARK, FLAT and MASK, each pointing to a reference file .rmap. The .rmap files are the most important because they actually encode the rules that the CRDS client uses to choose which actual FITS calibration file should be used based on the metadata available in the FITS header of the data file. First in the parkey key of the header it defines what fields of the input file header should be taken into consideration, for example the detector, the subarray configuration and the datetime of the observation. Then it encodes different rules to match for each value of the keys in parkey the filename of the FITS calibration file that should be used. Those files are available as well in the CRDS cache inside the references folder.

Calibration FITS files are quite large, they are therefore stored on Github using Git LFS and are automatically downloaded when a user clones the repository. In production, scientists would just interface with the CRDS server and the local CRDS cache will be automatically created and keep updated by synchronizing with the server. A Github repository with the CRDS Cache is just useful during the development phase.

Retrieve files from the CRDS

Within liger_iris_pipeline, all the subclasses of jwst.Step can recall a configuration file using the self.get_reference_file method and passing the input model (whose metadata will be used to find the right calibration file) and the type of calibration file requested.

Or we could create a temporary jwst.Step instance just to get the filename, for example:

> raw_science_frame = liger_iris_pipeline.datamodels.IRISImageModel("raw_science_frame_sci.fits")
> full_dark_filename = jwst.stpipe.Step().get_reference_file(raw_science_frame, "dark")
> print(full_dark_filename)
'~/crds_cache/references/tmt/iris/tmt_iris_dark_0001.fits'

Ingest new calibration files into CRDS

Users that would like to use a custom calibration file just occasionally can override them using options to the calibration pipeline, see for example the override_flat configuration option to the flat-fielding pipeline step.

Instead, developers that would like to add calibration files to the CRDS itself, and optionally provide a pull request to the CRDS cache repository on Github, should use the crds command line tool.

1) Make sure that the calibration file has all the necessary headers defined, if you are creating a file using liger_iris_pipeline this is automatically satisfied, for example using IRISImageModel.

  1. Add any additional header key, typically USEAFTER:

    USEAFTER= '2019-06-01 00:00:00'

  2. Create the new .rmap file:

    crds refactor2 insert_reference --verbose --old-rmap \
    ~/crds_cache/mappings/tmt/tmt_iris_flat_0003.rmap --new-rmap \
    ~/crds_cache/mappings/tmt/tmt_iris_flat_0004.rmap \
    --instruments IRIS \
    --references path/to/new/reference/file.fits

  3. Modify the .imap to point to this new file for the reference file we are working with

  4. Run the update_checksums.sh in the mappings/tmt folder to automatically update the checksums

  5. Add the FITS calibration file in the CRDS cache references/tmt/iris/ folder

  6. Optionally add all new files and modified files to the repository and send a Pull Request to the tmt-crds-cache repository