Improved STIS "Side-2" Calibration frames

The calibration frames in the tables below listed under the "RAJ/NPH" (R.A. Jansen/N.P. Hathi) column replace the ones listed under the "STScI/OPUS" column for use with science data in which the error due to the highly erratic Side-2 herring-bone pattern noise contributes significantly to the total error budget (e.g., low S/N exposures of extended objects, faint but crowded star fields). The pattern noise should be removed from those data using IDL procedure autofilet.pro, (for a short description, see: Jansen, Collins & Windhorst, 2003; a detailed paper, Jansen et al. 2005, is in preparation) and their image headers edited to list the appropriate pattern-cleaned bias-, dark- and pixel-to-pixel response reference frames, prior to recalibration using 'hst_calib.stis.calstis'.

In the following table, for each STScI/OPUS calibration frame a replacement calibration frame was produced using IRAF script rj_refbias within the external layered package rjstis (R.A. Jansen 2005) from raw STIS/CCD frames from which the herring-bone pattern-noise was first removed using autofilet.

The rjstis package will be made public so other researchers can generate calibration frames for time periods other than the ones covered below. To use rjstis, one also needs to download the rjtools and rjartdata external layered packages (for a modified version of artdata.mkheader)

Clicking on the names listed under the "RAJ/NPH" column will retrieve a FITS image of that name. Note that each image is ~10 Mb in size and that one may need to specify the download to be in binary mode (depending on the web-browser used).