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The Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes Newsletter


March 2013 Space Telescope Science Institute Back To News Center


The Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) Newsletter disseminates information about new data, analysis tools, and site functionality at MAST. Inquiries should be sent to archive@stsci.edu.


Table of Contents


HUT Spectra Reprocessed With Final Pipeline Version, Time-Tagged Photon Lists And New VO-compliant Format

The Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope was a shuttle-borne, UV spectrograph that flew on two missions in December 1990 and March 1995. A majority of observations were obtained in first spectral order, which covers 825-1850 Å at a resolution of 3 Å. Combined, the missions observed several hundred targets ranging from Solar System to stellar to extragalactic objects. These data have been available at MAST for many years, but now, Dixon et al. PASP, 2013 have reprocssed the HUT spectra with a final version of the data reduction pipeline.

Several important changes with this new pipeline have been made that will increase the quality and utility of these spectra. These include:

  • The base data format is now a FUSE-style, time-tagged photon list, implemented as a FITS file.
  • Extracted spectra (wavelength, flux) are stored in a single FITS file for each object (using both "all" and "night-only" times).
  • Quick-look plots for each object are available, and include three panels showing the spectrum, count rate during exposure, and pointing errors (see example on left).
  • Guider images are now available for download as FITS images, allowing users to confirm the position and orientation of the spectrograph aperture throughout each exposure.

Users may search and download data using our HUT Search Form, browse by object category through our HUT Catalog, or you can download the files through FTP. The HUT team has also made their suite of C-routines available for download, so users can generate new, custom versions of the FITS files, including/excluding additional photon events as they see fit. In the near future, these spectra will also be available through VO services.

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March 2013 Space Telescope Science Institute Back To News Center