WFC3 DASH Reduction Pipeline Development and Launch
Abstract
A new observing technique (DASH — drift and shift) has recently been developed for the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) that allows wider areas to be surveyed more efficiently. This technique relies solely on HST's gyroscopes to point and guide the telescope. However, this outputs smeared images due to the intrinsic "drift" that occurs from relying solely on the gyros during an observation. The non-destructive readout mode of the WFC3/IR sensor allows most of the native HST resolution to be recovered for data taken using the DASH observing mode. This is accomplished by creating partial images from differences in the consecutive, non-destructive reads and realigning them ("shift"). Such reduction can be onerous and thus the HST user community could greatly benefit from a public reduction pipeline that can easily reduce DASH data. In this contribution, we present the DASH Reduction Pipeline: a set of tools for reducing WFC3/IR images taken under gyro control. The pipeline creates the partial images and aligns them, while also including options for creating mosaics, segmentation maps and association files. In addition, it allows users to customize how they run it based on the contents of the image. We provide extensive documentation and tutorials to guide users through the reduction process. Following the completion of the pipeline, this project will be available on the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) Github page for complete public access.
- Publication:
-
American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #235
- Pub Date:
- January 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AAS...23537207O