| November 2, 1999 | Space Telescope Science Institute | Volume 7 |
| Index of Contents: | |
|---|---|
| Hubble Data Archive Status | Paolo Padovani |
| StarView II | Paolo Padovani |
| Searchable HST and FUSE Abstracts | Tim Kimball |
| Availability of ORFEUS/BEFS Data at MAST | Myron Smith |
| EUVE Calibration Observations Coordinated with Chandra | Damian Christian & J. Dupuis |
| Direct Retrievals of International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE) Data at MAST | Randy Thompson & Karen Levay |
| Web-Based Index Page for IUE Data Users | Myron Smith |
| IUE NEWSIPS Files Fixed | Cathy Imhoff |
The Hubble Data Archive (HDA) contains, as of November 1 1999, 7.0
Tbytes of data. The number of science datasets now totals almost
200,000. Archive ingest has averaged 3.6 Gbytes/day in 1999, while the
rate of data retrieval has been about 4 times as large. Work is in
progress towards the migration of the entire archive to the new
magneto-optical system. Cessation of ingest to the Sony platters, our
current archive media, is expected to occur in early 2000. New data
will be recorded exclusively to magneto-optical disks, while older data
will be transferred (by platter) to the new media whenever a request
for a dataset is processed.
Paolo Padovani
All our readers should be familiar with StarView, one of the two user
interfaces to the HDA (the other being our World Wide Web [WWW]
interface). Work is on-going on the successor to StarView, StarView II,
an astronomical database browser and research analysis tool. Developed
in Java, StarView II provides an easy to use, highly capable user
interface that runs on any Java-enabled platform as an applet or
application. StarView II features a superior custom query and search
form generation system. This system allows the user to easily define
search forms from scratch or to use standard forms as templates.
Multiple forms, each potentially using a different database site, can
run simultaneously within the same session. The flexibility to
interactively define database and attribute specifications introduces a
new level of power for the astronomical research community. At the same
time, standard, pre-defined forms supply a ready-made solution for most
users. An "alpha" version of StarView II has been demonstrated at the
recent Astronomical Data Analysis Software & Systems meeting in
Hawaii. A public release of StarView II is expected for Summer 2000.
Paolo Padovani
Abstracts for HST and FUSE observing proposals are now searchable
through the Web. The search syntax is similar to AltaVista's simple
search format, allowing you to match or exclude abstracts that contain
search words. Abstracts may be searched right from the HST or FUSE
archive pages, or through the forms at:
http://archive.stsci.edu/hst/abstract.html
The HST abstract search features pointers to archived data and further
information from PRESTO. The FUSE abstract search contains only the
program ID and the abstract, but more information will be added in the
future. Online help is available.
- Tim Kimball
ORFEUS (Orbiting and Retrieval Far and Extreme Ultraviolet
Spectrograph) is a telescope constructed and deployed by the German-US
space agencies. It was deployed during two Space Shuttle missions for 5
days in September, 1993 and 14 days in November, 1996. The full
telescope brings light to one of three spectrographs, including the
BEFS (Berkeley Extreme and Far-UV Spectrometer) at its prime focus.
The BEFS was designed to obtain spectra of UV point sources
simultaneously at FUV and EUV wavelengths (380--1175 Angstroms) at a
resolution of about 5000. With these capabilities BEFS provides a link
with previous UV spectroscopic missions such as Copernicus, EUVE, HUT,
IUE, and of course HST/GHRS and STIS.
MAST has ingested raw and processed spectra of ORFEUS-1 (Sept. 1993).
Data from the BEFS project have been installed on the web at URL:
http://archive.stsci.edu/befs).
The spectra can be downloaded
from a request page or as clickable links in a catalog page and can
be read with standard IDL-based or IRAF/STSDAS software. This data set
includes 75 UV sources. The BEFS group plans to send the ORFEUS-2 data
to MAST before the end of the year.
Myron Smith
Hubble Data Archive Status
StarView II
Searchable HST and FUSE Abstracts
http://archive.stsci.edu/fuse/abstract.html
Availability of ORFEUS/BEFS Data at MAST
| Target | Exposure | Observations Date(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Capella | 160 ksec | Sept 08 - 13, 1999 |
| V711 Tau | 150 ksec | Sept 13 - 22, 1999 |
| Procyon | 100 ksec | TBD |
| HZ 43 | 20 ksec | TBD |
The September 08, 1999 observation of Capella in permanent archive format is currently available at:
http://archive.stsci.edu/pub/euve/axafcal
And subsequent observations will be made available as soon as possible.
- D. Christian & J. Dupuis (UCB/SSL)
Data from the IUE final archive, accessible at the Multimission Archive
at STScI (MAST), can now be retrieved directly to the user's machine
with a very simple procedure. IUE data are in fact now stored on-site
at MAST in a CD-ROM juke-box. Data of interest can be searched using a
World Wide Web (WWW) interface at http://archive.stsci.edu/iue/search.php.
Selected datasets can then be downloaded at a push of a button. No
username or password is required.
Users may request the MXLO or MXHI data directly from the search
results page as a tar file. The user may request different options by
pushing the more options button. This page offers the user the
opportunity to select any of the NEWSIPS files or the original IUESIPS
files in both the GO format and in the RDAF format. All requests can
be made as a tar, tar.gz and zip file.
Requesters should remember that there maybe a slight delay while the
appropriate CD is loaded into the jukebox. If a large request is
issued, several CDs may be required, thus increasing the time needed to
fill the request. Users may find information found at
http://archive.stsci.edu/iue/mdr_help.html helpful.
Users may also retrieve the data via anonymous ftp. Users should be
cautioned that FTP access is currently restricted in the following
ways:
In general, IUE data can be accessed from archive.stsci.edu via
anonymous ftp. The files are accessed via symbolic links which are
stored in subdirectories under /pub/iue/data, and which are structured
according to the camera name and image sequence numbers. A separate
directory exists for each camera (i.e., lwp,lwr,swp,swr) and below each
of these directories is a separate directory for each 1000 image
numbers. These directories are named according to the starting image
number in each group (i.e., 1000, 2000, 3000, ...). As an example, a
typical interactive ftp session to acquire files lwp21500.mxlo.gz and
lwp21500.silo.gz would be:
For additional information on this option see
http://archive.stsci.edu/iue/ftp_retrieve.html.
IUE users should be aware that the IUE archive at the NSSDC will be
phased out in the next few weeks.
- Randy Thompson & Karen Levay
In the spirit of "one-stop shop," MAST staff have developed a
Web-based alphabetical index for users of IUE data. This index has
links to various handbooks and reports from the IUE project as well as
papers published in the literature. Thus it brings together
information data from pre-launch testing to post-mission data
processing (NEWSIPS, INES) as well as published evaluations. Its
purpose is to be a "yellow pages" resource permitting both novice and
experienced IUE users to access the best site for technical
information about the IUE instrument and data based on keywords or
phrases. Sites accessed are NEWSIPS/IUESIPS image processing manuals,
FAQs, published papers on data calibration and evaluation, and various
guides, log files, and software sites developed during the lifetime of
the mission.
- Myron Smith
Since the completion of the IUE Final Archive, we have been able to fix
some images that were either not properly processed or could not be
processed earlier. Images that were not properly processed were
generally due to errors in the database entries that have since been
corrected. In addition, some fixes and workarounds were made to allow
some images that did not initially process through the NEWSIPS system
to process correctly. Users may wish to check our list of fixed
images, both GSFC and VILSPA, to see if any of the images they are
interested in for their research have either been changed or are newly
available. A list of the updated images is available at
http://archive.stsci.edu/iue/newsips/update.html.
- Cathy Imhoff
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Direct Retrievals of International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE)
Data at MAST
ftp archive.stsci.edu
anonymous
username@univ.edu
binary
cd /pub/iue/data/lwp/21000
get lwp21500.mxlo.gz
get lwp21500.silo.gz
Web-Based Index Page for IUE Data Users
IUE NEWSIPS Files Fixed
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