An automated reduction pipeline for non-RV science on AAT/VELOCE

Abstract

Veloce began operations in tandem with the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), at a time marked by rapid growth in the number of known exoplanets. This growth underscores Veloce’s core purpose: the detection of small planets orbiting cool stars. The spectrograph is mounted on the Anglo-Australian Telescope, and is a high-resolution, fibre-fed instrument that offsets the costs of instrument stabilisation onto data analysis. In order to achieve high resolution for the spectrograph, it was necessary to sub-sample the typical telescope seeing with multiple small fibres. Unfortunately, this complex optical design solution causes the images of different fibres to overlap. The overlapping images have limited the radial velocity precision of the spectra. The applicability of Veloce to general spectroscopy has been greatly improved by extending the wavelength range to cover green and blue ranges down to 396 nm. To date, the data are only available as raw images, with some data being custom reduced on a case-by-case basis, but no official general reduction pipeline is available. In this paper, we introduce a new, fully automated, end-to-end pipeline designed for both quick-look assessment during observations and the production of science-ready spectra. The pipeline is publicly available, and while its extraction method is intentionally simplified, the results are consistent and coherent for use in non-radial-velocity science, including stellar characterisation and elemental abundance work.