P.L.Shopbell
California Institute of Technology
IRAF has clearly become the data reduction environment of choice for astronomers in many parts of the world. There are, however, a number of special-purpose image processing applications for which the general-purpose IRAF system is not well suited. One example of this is imaging Fabry-Perot data. Due to the complex three-dimensional data sets, many astronomers with such data employ image processing systems which can be easily extended with additional software routines. Chief among these systems is ZODIAC, a mathematical parser-based data reduction environment written by George Miyashiro of the University of Hawaii. In this paper, I compare and contrast the application of IRAF 2.10 and ZODIAC+ 1.0 (a recent re-structuring of ZODIAC 1.37) to the problem of imaging Fabry-Perot data analysis, in terms of both ease of use and programming extensibility. Through examples of data reduction procedures and the integration of user-written applications I demonstrate that both systems can be viable solutions for the problem of reducing complex three-dimensional data sets.