Paper detail

Spectra of faint sources in crowded fields with FRODOSpec on the Liverpool Robotic Telescope

We check the performance of the FRODOSpec integral-field spectrograph for observations of faint sources in crowded fields. Although the standard processing pipeline L2 yields too noisy fibre spectra, we present a new processing software (L2LENS) that gives rise to accurate spectra for the two images of the gravitationally lensed quasar Q0957+561. Among other things, this L2LENS reduction tool accounts for the presence of cosmic-ray events, scattered-light backgrounds, blended sources, and chromatic source displacements due to differential atmospheric refraction. Our non-standard reduction of Q0957+561 data shows the ability of FRODOSpec to provide useful information on a wide variety of targets, and thus, the big potential of integral-field spectrographs on current and future robotic telescopes.