Tilsotua: Reproducing Slitmask Sky Positions for use with the LRIS Multislit Archive
Abstract
We present tilsotua, a code that calculates sky positions of the slits from Low-Resolution Imaging Spectrograph (LRIS) slitmasks used in multislit observations. Raw data for the Keck/LRIS spectrograph does not include information about the sky positions of the slitmask targets, making it difficult to use beyond the scope of the original programs. tilsotua translates slit coordinates from the mask design files in the mask milling machine frame to sky coordinates. tilsotua also shifts the original input astrometry to modern frames using the objects targeted by mask alignment boxes. This can be applied to the archived mask design files at the Lick Observatory Archive. We demonstrate that the final reconstructed slit positions are accurate to 0."14 (RMS) across the set of archived masks based on a comparison of our calculated mask alignment box coordinates with Gaia astrometric positions of the likely alignment objects. We make available the tilsotua code, archived mask files, and slit positions of the historical masks for the community to maximize the science from Keck/LRIS data in the Keck Observatory Archive.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2504.08118,
title = {Tilsotua: Reproducing Slitmask Sky Positions for use with the LRIS Multislit Archive},
author = {Jessica Sullivan and J. Christopher Howk and Nicolas Lehner and John M. O'Meara and Sunil Simha},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.08118},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
23 pages, 7 figures, Published in PASP, tilsotua repository: https://github.com/KeckObservatory/tilsotua Added DOI, fixed author name typo