IRAC Instrument Handbook - IRSA - California Institute of Technology

6 Data Products
IRAC Instrument Handbook
This section describes the basic data products the observer will receive from the Spitzer Heritage Archive.
The available data products consist of Level 0 (raw) data, Level 1 (BCD) data, calibration files, log files,
and Level 2 (post-BCD) data. IRAC data are supplied as standard FITS files.
Each file consists of a single data collection event (i.e., a single exposure), and contains one image
corresponding to one of the four IRAC arrays (the exception being post-BCD products, described below).
The FITS headers are populated with keywords including (but not limited to) physical sky coordinates
and dimensions, a photometric solution, details of the instrument and spacecraft including telemetry when
the data were taken, and the steps taken during pipeline processing.
6.1 File-Naming Conventions
Table 6.1 lists the IRAC data files produced by the IRAC data reduction pipelines, together with brief
descriptions of these files. The Basic Calibrated Data (BCD) are the calibrated, individual images. These
are in array orientation and have a size of 256 x 256 pixels for the full array images, and 64 planes times
32 x 32 pixels for the subarray images. These data are fully calibrated and have detailed file headers. The
Post-BCD pipeline combines the BCD images into mosaics (per wavelength and per frame time).
Calibration observations designated as darks or flats go through a similar but separate pipeline that
generates the products listed in the last section of Table 6.1.
Note that because of the “first frame effect,” the first frame of every Astronomical Observation Request
(AOR) has a different delay time and it cannot be calibrated correctly. Therefore, the first frame of every
AOR with a frame time greater than 2 seconds is taken in HDR mode which causes the first frame to be
0.6 seconds or 1.2 seconds in duration instead of the full frame time. This first frame usually has a name
such as SPITZER_I1_11111111_0000_0000_2_bcd.fits and has no associated cosmic ray mask (brmsk
file). The observer is encouraged not to use this first short frame. The pipeline mosaicker does not use it
either when building the mosaic.
The BCD uncertainty files (listed below) are rough uncertainty estimations and do not include all of the
systematic effects associated with IRAC detectors, nor do they include the absolute flux uncertainty.
These uncertainty images are generated as follows. They begin as an estimate of the read noise (one
number in electrons for the whole image) and the shot-noise due to the sky (proportional to the squareroot
of the number of electrons in the image). Then each module propagates the uncertainty image
forward, including the uncertainties in dark and flat calibration files. The pipeline modules use the
uncertainty image as a way to quantitatively estimate the quality of the sky estimate given by the value of
a pixel. In the end, the uncertainty images overestimate the formal uncertainty of the image, because the
net propagated uncertainty is much higher than the observed pixel-to-pixel fluctuations in the images. We
therefore recommend that the uncertainty images only be used for relative weights between pixels, for
example when performing outlier rejection or making a weighted mosaic that combines multiple input
frames that view the same sky mosaic pixel.
Data Products 97 File-Naming Conventions