Slow Friday

There are some of those days when the world is just not cooperating! And today was one of them. The reduction code I have run 1000 times was giving me trouble all day long (and still is as of this moment). I am hoping that the particular dataset I was working with is to blame and I am trying with a different dataset. I learned a few fun little tricks in IDL - how to construct a histogram and how to fit a Gaussian, very useful. I am using the sky spectra to zero-point my spectroscopy. At least for the instrument I am looking at, the offsets of all ~300 sky spectra per mask are fairly small (~10km/s) and their distribution is tight and very well fit by a Gaussian. Both the mean and the median as well as the center of the Gaussian seem to be good measures of the center of the distribution - they are within 1 km/s of each other. Sky spectra are messy!