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Session 18 - STIS.
Display session, Wednesday, January 07
Exhibit Hall,
The Hubble Space Telescope STIS Pure Parallel program provides a unique opportunity to obtain very deep random images of the sky using a very wide spectral passband. Several hundred of pure parallel STIS direct images have already been accumulated. Individually, these images have an integration time of a few hundred seconds. However, each field is usually observed several times, sometimes over the course of several orbits, since it is observed in parallel with the observations of other HST cameras. Very deep (29^th limiting AB magnitude in a 45 minutes image), high resolution (0.05'' per pixel) images can be constructed if one combines several pure parallel images together. This task is complicated by the lack of knowledge of the exact position of the parallel field of view and the presence of hot pixels. The high spatial frequency information is therefore lost when several of these images are combined together. In this paper, we first report how to determine which images in the data archive can be combined together, then how to determine their true relative positions, and finally how to optimally combine them into one single long exposure image. Examples of images constructed in this manner are presented.
