An automated data reduction pipeline for AAO Data Central

We propose to make available ~30 million fully reduced and calibrated spectra of stars and galaxies collected with the Anglo-Australian Telescope’s AAOmega and HERMES spectrographs. The project will bring together the Telescope’s archival data, which is now made available through a revamped interface provided by the Australian Astronomical Observatory’s Data Central, and the Observatory’s mature 2dfdr data reduction package for these spectrographs. The developed software will, for an astrophysical object with raw data available in the archive, find and select necessary calibrations, gather them together, execute the reduction pipeline, and then return to the user calibrated spectra of the object. The data are already available online in raw form, and the new Data Central interface allows searching individual spectra. This project represents the final piece in making these spectra available on-demand in calibrated form. Based on evidence from existing archives at other observatories, we expect to double the scientific value of the data collected with HERMES and AAOmega—data that includes approximately one-third of all galaxy spectra, and one- half of all stellar spectra ever taken.