Automated spectroscopic abundances of A and F-type stars using echelle spectrographs - I. Reduction of ELODIE spectra and method of abundance determination

This paper presents an automated method to determine detailed abundances for A and F-type stars. This method is applied on spectra taken with the ELODIE spectrograph. Since the standard reduction procedure of ELODIE is optimized to obtain accurate radial velocities but not abundances, we present a more appropriate reduction procedure based on IRAF. We describe an improvement of the method of Hill & Landstreet (1993) for obtaining V sin i, microturbulence and abundances by fitting a synthetic spectrum to the observed one. In particular, the method of minimization is presented and tested with Vega and the Sun. We show that it is possible, in the case of the Sun, to recover the abundances of 27 elements well within 0.1 dex of the commonly accepted values.