L Paredes Poster

The MCELS Data Reduction Pipeline and Its Application to PNe Searches in the LMC 
 
L. Paredes (NOAO/CTIO), S. Points, C. Smith, A. Rest, G. Damke, A. Zeteno, and the MCELS Team
 

The Magellanic Cloud Emission-Line Survey (MCELS) surveyed both the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC, respectively) over six years using the UM/CTIO Curtis Schmidt telescope to produce deep images in [O III], H-alpha, and [S II] emission-lnes, in addition to adjacent green and red filters for continuum-subtraction. This survey covered the cental 8x8 degrees of the LMC and the central 3.5x4.5 degrees of the SMC and encompasses most of the gaseous extent of each galaxy with an angular resolution of ~5 arcsec or better, allowing us to identify and study interstellar structures on ~1 pc to kiloparsec physical scales.

We have modified the SuperMACHO/Essence-w pipeline, developed for Blanco 4m Mosaic II data, to reduce MCELS data in a uniform manner. In addition to basic reductions (e.g., bias-subtraction, flat-fielding, etc), this pipeline uses spatially-varying convolution kernels to match the PSFs of the narrow- and broad-band images and produce continuum-subtracted images for the narrow-band filters. 

We use flux measurements of previously identified planetary nebulae (PNe) in the LMC, e.g. Reid & Parker (2006), and photometry obtained by our pipeline to create color-magnitude and color-color diagrams in the MCELS filters to search for new PNe candidates in the LMC.