  Spectroscopic studies of planets outside of our own solar system provide some
of the most crucial information about their formation, evolution, and
atmospheric properties. In ground-based spectroscopy, the process of extracting
the planet's signal from the stellar and telluric signal has proven to be the
most difficult barrier to accurate atmospheric information. However, with novel
normalization and smoothing methods, this barrier can be minimized and the
detection significance dramatically increased over existing methods. In this
paper, we take two examples of CRIRES emission spectroscopy taken of HD 209458
b and HD 179949 b and apply SPORK (SPectral cOntinuum Refinement for telluriKs)
and iterative smoothing to boost the detection significance from 5.78 to 9.71
sigma and from 4.19 sigma to 5.90 sigma, respectively. These methods, which
largely address systematic quirks introduced by imperfect detectors or
reduction pipelines, can be employed in a wide variety of scenarios, from
archival data sets to simulations of future spectrographs.
