HST/NICMOS Paschen-α Survey of the Galactic Center

Wang et al. recently carried out the first wide-field hydrogen Paschen-α line imaging survey of the Galactic Centre using the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) instrument aboard the Hubble Space Telescope (program 11120). The survey maps out a region of 2253 pc² (416 arcmin²) around the central supermassive black hole (Sgr A*) in the 1.87 and 1.90 μm narrow bands with a spatial resolution of 0.01 pc (0.2 arcsec full width at half-maximum) at a distance of 8 kpc

Two relevant papers describe the project, data reduction and products:
HST/NICMOS Paschen-α Survey of the Galactic Centre: Overview Q.D. Wang et al. 2010, MNRAS 402:895
HST Paschen-alpha Survey of the Galactic Center: Data Reduction and Products H. Dong et al. MNRAS 417:114.

Explore the images with the HLA Interactive Display.

Products:

Images:
hlsp_hpsgc_hst_nicmos-nic3_gc_f187n_v1_img.fits -- The F187N mosaic in unit of uJy/pixel
hlsp_hpsgc_hst_nicmos-nic3_gc_f190n_v1_img.fits -- The F190N mosaic in unit of uJy/pixel
hlsp_hpsgc_hst_nicmos-nic3_gc_palpha_v1_img.fits -- The palpha mosaic in unit of uJy/pixel

Source catalogs
hlsp_hpsgc_hst_nicmos-nic3_gc_v1_sou_catalog.fits
source catalog hlsp_hpsgc_hst_nicmos-nic3_gc_v1_palpha_catalog.fits -- P-α source catalog

README

These data may be downloaded at http://archive.stsci.edu/pub/hlsp/hpsgc/ or
via anonymous ftp at archive.stsci.edu path /pub/hlsp/hpsgc.