Towards the automated reduction and calibration of SCUBA data from the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope

Abstract

The Submillimetre Common User Bolometer Array (SCUBA) instrument has been op- erating on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) since 1997. The data archive is now sufficiently large that it can be used to investigate instrumental properties and the variability of astronomical sources. This paper describes the automated calibra- tion and reduction scheme used to process the archive data with particular emphasis on ‘jiggle-map’ observations of compact sources. We demonstrate the validity of our automated approach at both 850- and 450-μm and apply it to several of the JCMT sec- ondary flux calibrators.We determine light curves for the variable sources IRC+10216 and OH 231.8. This automation is made possible by using the ORAC-DR data reduc- tion pipeline, a flexible and extensible data reduction pipeline that is used on UKIRT and the JCMT.