Abstract The Large Sky-Area Multi-Object Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) under construction by the National Astronomical Observatories will yield up to four thousand multi-fiber spectra of stars and galaxies per field. The present series of papers describes the automated data-reduction pipeline currently being designed in order to cope with the anticipated flood of spectrographic data. In this preliminary paper, we present an automated method for estimating the continuum level, the positions of strong lines and the 4000Å break in galaxy spectra. In order to obtain detailed information on the continuum, we use a wavelet filter bank. After continuum fitting, our software searches for a 4000Å break and distinguishes between emission-line galaxies (ELGs)and non-ELGs according to whether the break is small or large. It then searches for strong lines and measures the intensities of emission lines and the equivalent widths of absorption lines. For non-ELGs, the absorption lines are identified automatically yielding redshift measurements.
Keywords methods: data analysis --- techniques: spectroscopic --- galaxies: emission lines -- galaxies: absorption lines
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