A guide to analyzing EIS data#

This guide describes how to access, calibrate and derive scientific results from the EIS instrument on Hinode. For a description of EIS and its observing modes please consult the instrument paper, Culhane et al. (2007).

Tutorial#

The sections below describe individual steps in going from finding data to deriving scientific results. For new users tutorials are provided that show how to process example data-sets and derive results.

Tutorial for narrow slit data (1", 2" slits)

Tutorial for slot data (40", 266" slits)

Searching and downloading EIS data#

There are several methods for searching and downloading EIS data and these are summarized below. Follow the links to find more details.

Hinode Science Data Centre Europe

Contains all of the Hinode data and has very flexible search tools.

MSSL Science Centre

Only EIS data; uses SQL for flexible searches.

Virtual Solar Observatory

EIS_CAT

Calibrating EIS data#

Calibration of EIS data is performed with a single IDL routine, EIS_PREP, which converts a level-0 FITS file (raw data) to a level-1 FITS file (calibrated data). Note that the data archives listed above do not distribute level-1 files, so the user needs to perform the calibration. It is highly recommended that the user perform calibration before browsing the data as detector artifacts called warm pixels make browsing the raw data difficult.

eis_prep options

Detailed description of eis_prep processing steps

Taking a quick-look at your data#

For browsing a data-set there are several 'quicklook' tools available that can be accessed through a single IDL widget called XFILES. The tools are:

Detector - displays detector images.

Browser - allows user to browse the 3D data cubes (wavelength-X-Y) obtained from narrow slit observations.

Spectroheliogram - for a specified line shows a solar-Y vs. wavelength plot for each exposure.

Whisker - for a specified line shows a solar-X vs. wavelength plot for each exposure.

Intensity map - for a specified line shows an intensity image.

EIS objects and structures#

After you have calibrated your data with eis_prep and had a quick-look at the contents you will be ready to do more detailed analysis from the IDL command line. There are two options:

1. Read all EIS data into an IDL object
2. Read an individual wavelength window into an IDL structure (eis_getwindata)

Many of the EIS analysis routines make use of the eis_getwindata structures, and so this is generally recommended.

Narrow slit data (1", 2" slits)#

The 1" and 2" slits return emission line spectra and a basic task for such data-sets is to fit Gaussians to the emission lines to return intensity, centroid and width information. Gaussian fitting routines available to EIS users are described below. Interpretation of centroids and widths is hampered by certain instrumental effects and these are dealt with in the sections below.