Hubble Space Telescope Science Data Archive
Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Science Data Archive.
HST Archive Overview
- Raw (uncalibrated) and calibrated files are available for each HST dataset, as are files describing the data quality and calibration process.
- The files in a HST dataset all share the same nine characters rootname (IPPPSSOOT).
- Typical sizes for HST datasets belonging to different instruments are listed in the dataset size table.
Datasets pertaining to different HST instruments contain different types of files:
- FOC: Faint Object Camera dataset description
- FOS: Faint Object Spectrograph dataset description
- GHRS: Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph dataset description
- WFPC: Wide Field / Planetary Camera dataset description
- WFPC2: Wide Field / Planetary Camera dataset description
On The Fly Recalibration of HST Data
Until now, when users requested calibrated data from the HST archive, they received the data produced by the RSDP (Routing Science Data Processing) pipeline at the Space Telescope Science Institute. However, with instrumental properties changing with time, better approaches for calibration of some instruments have been introduced and there have been other general improvements to the calibration of HST data.
For this reason the CADC and the ST-ECF have introduced an option in the process of retrieving data from the HST archive, allowing the On The Fly Recalibration.
Our automatic process:
- retrieves the raw data,
- updates the header in order to reflect the current information on which reference files to use (via the CDBS database) and what calibration steps to perform (via a rule based system)
- runs the standard calibration pipeline.
Depending on your request options, datasets recalibrated by the ST-ECF will contain:
rootname.xxx.fits - Raw and Auxiliary Files
rootname.c[0-9].fits - data re-calibrated on the fly
rootname.ecf.log - CALxxx log file
rootname.log - iraf overall processing log
References:
The original OTF concept (1996) (html)
The extension to NICMOS and STIS (1998) (postscript: 73 KB)
To find out more about:
- which versions of the OTF Calibration S/W are used at ST-ECF: http://archive.eso.org/archive/otf_versions
- the HST Jitter / Observation Log files: http://archive.eso.org/archive/hst/observation_log/OL_1.html
- the ST-ECF/CADC WFPC2 Associations Project: http://archive.eso.org/archive/hst/wfpc2_asn/
HST Archive Browsers
The following is a list of query forms currently available to access the Hubble Space Telescope Archive. Access is supplied through the WDB interface. If this is the first time you use this system please read the short WDB user guide on how to specify queries in this system.
- HST Science Exposures (Browsing observations, searching by coordinates, OTF Calibration...)
- Dedicated STIS Exposures query screen
- HST Datasets Retrieval (Retrieving a given list of datasets, OTF Calibration)
- HST Best Calibration Files (Retrieving currently best reference files)
- HST Abstracts & Proposals (Browsing proposals and proposal's exposures by PI, keywords, proposal ID, ...)
- HST Abstracts (Full text search)
- HST Publications (Searching by title, author, reference ...)
- http://archive.eso.org/archive/hst/iue-classes/ HST spectra with IUE classes] (Classification of HST spectra via cross-identification with the IUE mission log and/or via free text terms in HST proposals)