Adaptive wavelength calibration algorithm for LAMOST

Abstract

An adaptive algorithm is presented for the wavelength calibration of the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST). The new algorithm can identify emission lines of calibration lamp without manual interaction and then fit relationship between the pixel positions and the wavelengths by utilizing a polynomial function. In this study, experiments are performed both on the actual data observed by LAMOST and the simulated data to analyze the accuracy and the robustness. The experimental results show that the proposed automatic algorithm can perform the lines identification exactly and acquire the wavelength solution accurately. Thus, an applicable approach is provided for the wavelength calibration of LAMOST. © Astronomical Society of Australia 2010.