Feature Request: Port some spectroscopic tools from IRAF

[pllim]

Is this the right place for such a request? The request was, "... spectrum analysis tasks such as standard, sensfunc, identify, and reidentify... I hope in future we will have sophisticated Python library for spectrum analysis."

c/c @SaraOgaz

[crawfordsm]

Somewhat of a port of identify is available here:
https://github.com/crawfordsm/specidentify
It can be updated to handle just about any spectrograph, but it is currently lacking in documentation.

Eventually we hope to add more tools to:
https://github.com/astropy/specreduce
but no work has really been done on that yet.

[eteq]

@pllim @SaraOgaz - agreed in a broad sense! First, let me bring to your attention #167, where there's a link to the project where we are starting to scope out the various planned tools for specutils.

Note, though, that some of this belongs better in specreduce. The scope of specutils is meant to be limited to "I have a spectrum that's been reduced and want to do stuff with it", while specreduce is "I have a raw output from my instrument and need to do ccd reductions, flat-field, wavelength cal, and so on. identify, reidentify, and sensfunc *might* belong better inspecreduce, but standard is a bit more debatable...?

[eteq]

Hah, my comment collided with @crawfordsm - but hopefully similar content 😉

[pllim]

OK, the replies sound promising. Thanks! I think what is a good start might be a "conversion" table and status of each task. Example row: identify | specidentify | available

[crawfordsm]

That's definitely a good idea -- maybe start something on the specreduce wiki pages? That would probably be a good place and hopefully most things start getting added into specreduce

[pllim]

I went to astropy/specreduce but nothing happens when I click on "Wiki"; it just silently reloads the "Code" page.

[bsipocz]

@pllim - that probably means that the checkbox for "wikis" in the settings/features is not clicked.

[pllim]

Okay, I don't have admin rights to specreduce, so someone who is admin there need to create the Wiki first. Thanks!

[tepickering]

for reference, we kickstarted specreduce development during #pyastro18 so hopefully that will continue to snowball. we also fleshed out its roadmap at https://github.com/astropy/specreduce/projects/2.

[eteq]

After looking at what's in https://github.com/astropy/specreduce/projects/2 and comparing to the list in this issue, I think there's really only one thing left that belongs in specutils, which I will create as a separate issue that's more focused and then close this one (but link to this one so in the future others can see it).

[pllim]

We still need a conversion guide somewhere but I don't know where is the best place for this.

[nmearl]

Conversations concerning the translation of comparable iraf tasks to the spec tools should occur in the specreduce repository (specifically spacetelescope/specreduce#40).

[pllim]

After two years, I still cannot find a good IRAF conversion guide for this when I get help calls. Is there one somewhere? Thanks!