The Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility and the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre have started a projet aimed at augmenting the way an astronomer an query the Hubble Space Telescope science archive. Today the HST archive contains more than 70,000 WFPC2 expo-sures. We are preparing an automatic pipeline that will extract several parameters from those images. A list of all the sources seen by WFPC2, along with photo-metrical, morphological and astrometric measurements of both the detected astronomical sources and of the background will be extracted. Astronomers will make use of such a database to query the archive in a more sophisticated and scientific manner, that is in the way they think, not in the way the archive is built. This new approach will allow queries of the kind: search for high latitude fields having a certain limiting magnitude and where the density of extended sources is greater than a certain threshold. Nowadays, with the advent of huge detectors over big fields of view, such an approach becomes a must. The catalog of extracted objects will be immediately useful to prepare a wide range of scientific programs for the 8 - 10 meter class telescopes, e.g., multi-object spectroscopy of HST sources.
The HST Data Archive as a Discovery Tool: First Experiment
G. Malloci;
2000-01-01
Abstract
The Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility and the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre have started a projet aimed at augmenting the way an astronomer an query the Hubble Space Telescope science archive. Today the HST archive contains more than 70,000 WFPC2 expo-sures. We are preparing an automatic pipeline that will extract several parameters from those images. A list of all the sources seen by WFPC2, along with photo-metrical, morphological and astrometric measurements of both the detected astronomical sources and of the background will be extracted. Astronomers will make use of such a database to query the archive in a more sophisticated and scientific manner, that is in the way they think, not in the way the archive is built. This new approach will allow queries of the kind: search for high latitude fields having a certain limiting magnitude and where the density of extended sources is greater than a certain threshold. Nowadays, with the advent of huge detectors over big fields of view, such an approach becomes a must. The catalog of extracted objects will be immediately useful to prepare a wide range of scientific programs for the 8 - 10 meter class telescopes, e.g., multi-object spectroscopy of HST sources.
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