nickel reduction tutorial
Creating an educational tutorial walking through the image reduction process for the Nickel telescope
Raw telescope images need cleaning before they’re useful for science. The camera adds its own electronic noise, and its pixels don’t all respond to light equally, so each image has to be corrected using calibration frames taken the same night.
I wrote a step-by-step notebook that walks through that process for the Nickel Telescope at Lick Observatory, using a real image of the galaxy NGC 3982. It explains each step and the terms behind it in plain language, for students and anyone new to observing.
The tutorial builds on pipnick, a Nickel pipeline written by Allison Eto and Kyle Westfall. This work led into STIPS.