The RAVE spectroscopic survey: obtaining the chemical abundances.

We discuss some problems and their solutions which we encountered during the development of the RAVE chemical processing pipeline, which has been built to create the RAVE chemical catalogue; the latter will hold about 50% of the one million stars observed by 2011 by the RAVE spectroscopic survey. The relatively small wavelength range (8410–8795Å), the medium resolution (R≃7500) and the large number of spectra to process are unusual characteristics for chemical abundances works. RAVE is pioneering this field before the upcoming Gaia mission, with which it share very similar spectral characteristics. We presents our solutions to: (i) equivalent width measurements; (ii) oscillator strength precision and availability in the literature; (iii) detection and rejection of bad data; (iv) accuracy of the chemical abundances obtained. We also demonstrate on an example the potential of the RAVE chemical catalogue with respect to the analysis of the thin and thick disk. Furthermore, we discuss possible ways for future improvements of our present results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]