WFC3: Improved WFC3 Calibration Products
Abstract
The Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) is a fourth-generation UV/visible and IR imaging instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Installed in May 2009, during HST servicing mission 4, both channels have been performing very well on-orbit. To provide optimum calibrated data, the WFC3 team routinely updates and refines the calibration software and associated files, designated as calibration products. We present some of the recently improved calibration products that will be of interest to current and future users of WFC3, including information on the chip-dependent zeropoints and flat fields, post-flash calibrations, and detector-to-image distortion corrections. The latter results in four new extensions (two per chip and dimension), in all UVIS FLTs retrieved from MAST after September 10, 2013. The D2IMFILE contains astrometric corrections for shifts of the raw X and Y positions induced by the lithographic-mask pattern. We discuss the migration of CALWF3 from the STSDAS package to HSTCAL, a package independent of IRAF; as a consequence, the IRAF/STSDAS version of CALWF3 is no longer being updated. Finally, we summarize recent improvements to aXe, a PyRAF/IRAF software package that enables automated extraction of spectra from WFC3 slitless spectral (grism) images. Updated versions of aXe are made available as part of the STSDAS testing environment (SSBX).
- Publication:
-
American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #223
- Pub Date:
- January 2014
- Bibcode:
- 2014AAS...22314904G