Getting Started with HUT

• Obtaining HUT data
• Reading HUT data
• Data products

The Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope (HUT) was the spectrographic component of a triad of coaligned telescopes that flew in Space Shuttle missions during December 1990 and March 1995. HUT was designed to overlap and extend to short wavelengths the coverage of previous ultraviolet missions and was contemporaneous with the IUE satellite. The HUT missions were instrumental in helping to define the key science requirements of the FUSE satellite.

Target fluxes were detected by photoamplification of bursts produced by a phosphor and scanned at a video rate. The phosphor bursts are time-tagged, accumulated, and located by a centroid-finding routine in two dimensions. The centroid positions are computed to bins of 1/4 of the physical pixel spacing of the detector, thus producing a partially-processed, 1 x 2048 spectrum in the first ('raw') data file that the user sees.

The search form may be used to select data from the HUT database by object name, coordinates, date of observation, or target class (general). The data files of interest can then be marked and retrieved. The returned dataset will consist of several FITS files, which are described in the Data Products page.