Contact

Bourque Matthew
Position:
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland
Address
United States

Miscellaneous Information

Miscellaneous Information

Abstract Reference: 31095
Identifier: P6.4
Presentation: Poster presentation
Key Theme: 6 Python in Astronomy

The Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field Camera 3 Quicklook Project

Authors:
Bourque Matthew, Bajaj Varun, Bowers Ariel, Dulude Michael, Durbin Meredith, Gosmeyer Catherine, Gunning Heather, Khandrika Harish, Martlin Catherine, Sunnquist Ben, Viana Alex

The Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) instrument has been acquiring ~50-100 images daily since its installation in 2009.  The WFC3 Quicklook project provides a means for WFC3 instrument analysts to store, calibrate, monitor, and interact with these data through the various Quicklook systems: (1) a ~200 TB filesystem, which stores the entire WFC3 archive on disk, (2) a MySQL database, which stores image header data, (3) a Python-based automation platform, which currently executes 28 unique calibration and monitoring scripts, (4) a Python-based code library, which provides system functionality such as logging, downloading tools, database connection objects, and filesystem management, and (5) a Python/Flask-based web interface to the Quicklook system.  The Quicklook project has enabled large-scale WFC3 analyses and calibrations, such as the monitoring of the health and stability of the WFC3 instrument, the measurement of ~20 million WFC3/UVIS PSFs, the creation of WFC3/IR persistence calibration products, and many others. The Quicklook system may be extended to support the forthcoming James Webb Space Telescope mission.