Automatic data reduction in support of the FLAMES-UVES VLT facility

With the deployment of the new FLAMES facility at the Kueyen Unit Telescope of the VLT, multi object, fibre fed capability will be added to the UVES spectrograph. The FLAMES-UVES Data Reduction Software is a C Library embedded in the MIDAS environment. It is designed to extend the UVES pipeline functionalities to support the operation and to monitor the night and long term performance of FLAMES-UVES at Kueyen telescope of the VLT. The peculiar spectral format of FLAMES-UVES imposes very stringent constraints on instrument stability, and poses some major challenges. Some of them are common to any multi fibre fed echelle spectrograph, such as automatic order and fibre location and identification, deblending of spectra carried by neighboring fibres, flagging and removal of cosmic ray hits etc.; others are typical of FLAMES/UVES, such as the automatic measurement and correction of some spectrograph instabilities which, although irrelevant for slit mode operation, would severely cripple the maximum achievable S/N ratio in the fibre-fed case, if neglected. Throughout the reduction, errors are thoroughly propagated from raw frames to the final data products, pixel by pixel, easing the assessment of the actual, physical significance of weak features. We shortly discuss the performance of the pipeline and to what extent the DRS can be expected to recover the full information content without introducing artifacts, showing its results on test data.