Continuum Fitting with Python using specutils

Question

it's my first time processing spectra from a black body radiation experiment, I'm using Python and having some troubles... I have this spectra with 2 peaks and uneven background noise which I want to normalize, I tried using specutils 1.1 "continuum-fitting" (documentation here: https://specutils.readthedocs.io/en/stable/fitting.html#continuum-fitting )

My implementation is this:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import numpy as np 
from astropy.modeling import models
from astropy import units as u
from specutils.spectra import Spectrum1D, SpectralRegion
from specutils.fitting import fit_generic_continuum

...

x = data[:, 0]
y = data[:, 1]
plt.plot(x, y, label = 'My Data', c='C0')

spectrum = Spectrum1D(flux=y*u.Jy, spectral_axis=x*u.um)
g1_fit = fit_generic_continuum(spectrum)
y_fit = g1_fit(x*u.um)

plt.plot(x, y_fit, label = ' Specutils Continuum Fit', c='C1')

plt.legend()

But the result is somewhat disappointing

Am I doing something wrong? Do you have any other way to normalize the background noise in python? any suggestion at all?

Answer 1

At the end I settled on using a median filter from scipy (medfilt) and with a high enough kernel it removed the spikes completely.

The problem on my specutils implementation was that I needed to exclude the peaks in the spectrum window by doing this, althought I found this too hard to implement on 100-120 data measurement I had:

...
from specutils import SpectralRegion

spectrum = Spectrum1D(flux=y*u.Jy, spectral_axis=x*u.um)
g1_fit = fit_generic_continuum(spectrum, exclude_regions=[SpectralRegion(2 * u.um, 6 * u.um), SpectralRegion(58 * u.um, 65 * u.um)])
y_fit = g1_fit(x*u.um)