DustEM computes the extinction and the emission of interstellar dust grains heated by photons. It is written in Fortran 95 and is jointly developed by IAS and CESR. The dust emission is calculated in the optically thin limit (no radiative transfer) and the default spectral range is 40 to 108 nm. The code is designed so dust properties can easily be changed and mixed and to allow for the inclusion of new grain physics.

Skycorr is an instrument-independent sky subtraction code that uses physically motivated line group scaling in the reference sky spectrum by a fitting approach for an improved sky line removal in the object spectrum. Possible wavelength shifts between both spectra are corrected by fitting Chebyshev polynomials and advanced rebinning without resolution decrease. For the correction, the optimized sky line spectrum and the automatically separated sky continuum (without scaling) is subtracted from the input object spectrum. Tests show that Skycorr performs well (per cent level residuals) for data in different wavelength regimes and of different resolution, even in the cases of relatively long time lags between the object and the reference sky spectrum. Lower quality results are mainly restricted to wavelengths not dominated by airglow lines or pseudo continua by unresolved strong emission bands.

Molecfit corrects astronomical observations for atmospheric absorption features based on fitting synthetic transmission spectra to the astronomical data, which saves a significant amount of valuable telescope time and increases the instrumental efficiency. Molecfit can also estimate molecular abundances, especially the water vapor content of the Earth’s atmosphere. The tool can be run from a command-line or more conveniently through a GUI.