The 35th annual conference on Astronomical Data Analysis Software & Systems 2025 in Görlitz, Germany

The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) has gathered a considerable amount of scientific data between first light in May 2010 to the final observing flight in September 2022. The joint mission by NASA and DLR produced a diverse set of astronomical data from several science instruments.

During the active time of the mission the SOFIA Data Processing Software Team worked in cooperation with experts from the science instrument teams in order to write and maintain the reduction software suite "SOFIA Redux". The framework written in Python provides general purpose data reduction functions and dedicated modules for the SOFIA instruments EXES, FIFI-LS, FLITECAM, FORCAST, and HAWC+. It was constantly improved and maintained until the end of the mission, with a most recent release of patch updates in August 2023. The SOFIA Data Center has forked the open source code base from GitHub and continues to keep the code fresh, accommodating API changes for underlying Python libraries, such as NumPy, SciPy, and AstroPy. Furthermore, new features and improved reduction techniques are being implemented into the instrument reduction pipelines. These new pipeline versions will be used for a general reprocessing of available SOFIA observation data for the SDC Science Archive complementing the products available from IRSA.

While our software development generally takes place on the internal GitHub Enterprise instance, updates are frequently and transparently pushed to the publicly available on GitHub repository. The SDC has also received ownership for the established sofia-redux handle on the Python Packaging Index (PyPI), which will enable users to migrate to the updated versions seamlessly. We want to introduce the new home of the software at the SOFIA Data Center and encourage the astronomy community to collaborate in the software updates through discussions, bug reports, and code contributions.