HiFLEx – a highly flexible package to reduce cross-dispersed Echelle spectra

We describe a flexible data reduction package for high resolution cross-dispersed echelle data. This open-source package is developed in Python and includes optional GUIs for most of the steps. It does not require any pre-knowledge about the form or position of the echelle-orders. It has been tested on cross-dispersed echelle spectrographs between 13k and 115k resolution (bifurcated fiber-fed spectrogaph ESO-HARPS and single fiber-fed spectrograph TNT-MRES). HiFLEx can be used to determine radial velocities and is designed to use the TERRA package but can also control the radial velocity packages such as CERES and SERVAL to perform the radial velocity analysis. Tests on HARPS data indicates radial velocities results within ±3ms−1 of the literature pipelines without any fine tuning of extraction parameters.