The ESO's VLT/SPHERE instrument includes a unique long-slit spectroscopy (LSS) mode coupled with Lyot coronagraphy in its infrared dual-band imager and spectrograph (IRDIS) for spectral characterization of young, giant exoplanets detected by direct imaging. The SILSS pipeline is a combination of the official SPHERE pipeline and additional custom IDL routines developed within the SPHERE consortium for the speckle subtraction and spectral extraction of a companion's spectrum; it offers a complete end-to-end pipeline, from raw data (science+calibrations) to a final spectrum of the companion. SILSS works on both the low-resolution (LRS) and medium-resolution (MRS) data, and allows correction for some of the known biases of the instrument. Documentation is included in the header of the main routine of the pipeline.

The high-contrast imager SPHERE at the Very Large Telescope combines extreme adaptive optics and coronagraphy to directly image exoplanets in the near-infrared. The vlt-sphere package enables easy reduction of the data coming from IRDIS and IFS, the two near-infrared subsystems of SPHERE. The package relies on the official ESO pipeline (ascl:1402.010), which must be installed separately.