Near-Infrared Spectral Templates of L Dwarfs

As described in Meeting the Cool Neighbors XII: An Optically-Anchored Analysis of the Near-Infrared Spectra of L Dwarfs (Cruz et. al.), we have combined the NIR spectra of objects of the same optical spectral type to make NIR spectral average templates for field and low-gravity L dwarfs at each integer spectral type, in the range L0–L8. As more optical and/or NIR data are collected for L dwarfs, the templates could potentially be updated. In anticipation of this, we dub the templates presented here version 1.0.

The naming convention of the ascii files is the following:

Spectral type + Band + Gravity

Gravity can be 
        'f' (field objects) or 
        'b' ({beta}-type low-gravity objects) or 
        'g' ({gamma}-type very low-gravity objects)

Example: L1H_f.txt is the template for the H band of the field L1 objects.

Columns are:
        1. Wavelength in microns
        2. Average normalized flux
        3. Normalized flux standard deviation
        4. Min normalized flux
        5. Max normalized flux    
The last two columns define the range of the strip at each wavelength.

The files are formatted according to the machine readable format used by the AAS Journals and CDS/VizieR. The files can be read in python using the astropy package:

        from astropy.table import Table
        data = Table.read("L1H_f.dat", format="ascii.cds")