HIIexplorer: Detect and extract integrated spectra of HII regions

HIIexplorer detects and extracts the integrated spectra of HII regions from IFS datacubes. The procedure assumes H ii regions are peaky/isolated structures with a strong ionized gas emission, clearly above the continuum emission and the average ionized gas emission across the galaxy and that H ii regions have a typical physical size of about a hundred or a few hundreds of parsecs, which corresponds to a typical projected size at the distance of the galaxies of a few arcsec for galaxies at z~0.016. All input parameters can be derived from either a visual inspection and/or a statistical analysis of the Hα emission line map. The algorithm produces a segmentation FITS file describing the pixels associated to each H ii region. A newer version of this code, pyHIIexplorer (ascl:2206.010), is available.