Fabry-Perot Data Analysis

Historically, the analysis of imaging Fabry-Perot data has been a daunting task, requiring complex software techniques (Bland & Tully 1989 ) and expensive hardware capable of rapidly processing and storing the large data sets. The latter of these restrictions has been lifted in recent years with the advent of powerful workstations and large, fast disk storage at prices cheap enough to make them accessible to the average scientist. However, the analysis of large and complex Fabry-Perot data sets still proves a formidable obstacle to the astronomer due to the lack of standard reduction packages. Most Fabry-Perot astronomers use small non-portable software distributions which have been developed in-house, usually tailored to a specific instrument or observing style. Motivated by the lack of a standard toolset for the analysis of Fabry-Perot data, we are currently developing a Fabry-Perot package in IRAF (Bland-Hawthorn, Shopbell, & Cecil 1992). Written in native SPP code, this package is the first attempt to provide the astronomical community with an organized system for reducing Fabry-Perot data, within the common image processing environment of IRAF . The IRAF Fabry-Perot package has now been greatly enhanced through the use of one of the most important recent developments in the IRAF environment: GUIs. While graphical user interfaces (GUIs) have been commonplace since the introduction of the Macintosh personal computer , IRAF has been slow to adopt graphical front-ends for their packages, primarily due to questions of portability and longevity. The IRAF GUI system , which is being distributed as a part of IRAF 2.11 (and as an add-on package to IRAF 2.10 ), provides a method of isolating hardware- and graphics display-dependent code from the user-level graphics interface. This allows a developer to add a GUI to a task by composing a single command script which is passed to a ``widget server'' at runtime. This script is interpreted by the server and instantiated on the selected graphics device. At this time the server supports X Window System graphics output. The IRAF GUI system provides a number of standard widgets, including scroll bars, radio buttons, labels, frames, and lists. In addition, a widget that has been customized for astronomical applications is included: the XGterm widget. The XGterm widget has support for the display of both line and image graphics and has been used to develop the xgterm and ximtool clients, X11 tools which replace their obsolete Sunview counterparts. FPTOOL is the first attempt to take advantage of these new IRAF graphics capabilities in order to support the analysis of Fabry-Perot data.