P.L.Shopbell
Astronomy Department, California Institute of Technology, Mail
Code 105-24, Pasadena, CA. 91125
Despite the widespread use of IRAF for astronomical data reduction, there are a number of special-purpose image processing applications for which the general-purpose IRAF system may not be 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 ``home-grown'' 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, we examine the suitability of IRAF 2.10 and ZODIAC+ 1.0 (a recent re-structuring of ZODIAC 1.38) to the problem of imaging Fabry-Perot data analysis, in terms of both ease of use and programming extensibility. We demonstrate that both systems can be viable solutions for the problem of reducing complex three-dimensional data sets.