Identification of OH emission lines from IGRINS sky spectra and improved sky subtraction method

  • Published : 2019.04.10

Abstract

The hydroxyl radical (OH) sky emission lines arise from the Earth's mesosphere, and they serve as a major source of the sky background in the infrared. With IGRINS, the observed line strength show non-negligible variation even within a few minutes of time scale, making its subtraction difficult. Toward the aim better sky subtraction in the IGRINS pipeline, we present 1) improved identification of sky lines in H and K band and 2) improved method of subtracting sky background. Using the recent line list of Brooke et al. (2015), we have detected ~500 OH doublets from upper vibrational level between 2 and 9 and maximum upper J level of 25. In particular, we found that a significant fraction of unidentified lines reported by Oliva et al. (2015) are indeed OH lines resulting from transitions between different F levels. With the extended line identification, we present an improved method of sky subtraction. The method, based on the method of Noll et al. (2014), empirically accounts non-LTE level population of OH molecules.

Keywords