RVSAO 2.0 - A Radial Velocity Package for IRAF

Douglas J. Mink and Michael J. Kurtz
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA 02138

Abstract

RVSAO 2.0 is the latest release of a package for calculating apparent radial velocities of celestial objects from observed spectral shifts. There are two main tasks in the package, XCSAO and EMSAO. XCSAO cross-correlates the spectrum of an object against a set of template spectra of known spectral shifts to obtain a velocity and error. EMSAO finds emission lines in a spectrum and computes the observed centers, getting individual shifts and errors for each line as well as a single velocity combining all of the lines. Three tasks which are new in this release are :
  • SUMSPEC, which combines spectra after shifting them all to a specified redshift,
  • LINESPEC, which creates a spectrum at a specified redshift from a list of rest wavelengths, and
  • BCVCORR, which computes the correction needed to translate the observed radial velocity to one relative to the solar system barycenter. Full documentation of this software is on-line at http://tdc-www.harvard.edu/iraf/rvsao/.

    Presented at the Seventh Annual Conference on Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems in September 1997
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