Adaptive spatial binning of integral-field spectroscopic data using Voronoi tessellations

Abstract

We present new techniques to perform adaptive spatial binning of integral-field spectroscopic (IFS) data to reach a chosen constant signal-to-noise ratio per bin. These methods are required for the proper analysis of IFS observations, but can also be used for standard photometric imagery or any other two-dimensional data. Various schemes are tested and compared by binning and extracting the stellar kinematics of the Sa galaxy NGC 2273 from spectra obtained with the panoramic IFS SAURON.