Pyodine: An open, flexible reduction software for iodine-calibrated precise radial velocities

Abstract: For existing and future projects dedicated to measuring precise radial velocities (RVs), we have created an open-source, flexible data reduction software to extract RVs from \'echelle spectra via the iodine (I$_2$) absorption cell method. The software, called $pyodine$, is completely written in Python and has been built in a modular structure to allow for easy adaptation to different instruments. We present the fundamental concepts employed by $pyodine$, which build on existing I$_2$ reduction codes, and give an overview of the software's structure. We adapted $pyodine$ to two instruments, Hertzsprung SONG located at Teide Observatory (SONG hereafter) and the Hamilton spectrograph at Lick Observatory (Lick hereafter), and demonstrate the code's flexibility and its performance on spectra from these facilities. Both for SONG and Lick data, the $pyodine$ results generally match the RV precision achieved by the dedicated instrument pipelines. Notably, our code reaches a precision of roughly $0.69 \,m\,s^{-1}$ on a short-term solar time series of SONG spectra, and confirms the planet-induced RV variations of the star HIP~36616 on spectra from SONG and Lick. Using the solar spectra, we also demonstrate the capabilities of our software in extracting velocity time series from single absorption lines. A probable instrumental effect of SONG is still visible in the $pyodine$ RVs, despite being a bit damped as compared to the original results. With $pyodine$ we prove the feasibility of a highly precise, yet instrument-flexible I$_2$ reduction software, and in the future the code will be part of the dedicated data reduction pipelines for the SONG network and the Waltz telescope project in Heidelberg.