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J. Biretta, S. Baggett, S. Casertano, S. Gonzaga, I. Heyer, M. Wiggs, M. McMaster (STScI)
We review the status of the Wide-Field Planetary Camera II (WFPC2) onboard the Hubble Space Telescope as well as recent enhancements to calibration and analysis methods. The instrument continues to perform extremely well. Low level effects such as dark current and CTE continue to increase with long-term radiation exposure (see poster on CTE by Heyer et al.), but have minimal effect on most observations. The long-term photometric stability appears to be excellent, with most filters showing changes of a few percent or less. Recent work shows that aperture photometry for small apertures (1-2 pixel radius) will be affected at the 5% to 10% level by target position due to small focus variations across the CCD. New flat fields are available which correct long-term changes in the illumination pattern; corrections are typically 0.5%, though small dust spots have corrections up to 12%. The Dither Package software has been upgraded to include mosaicing of all 4 CCDs, as well as cosmic ray removal from single image pointings. These and other topics are reviewed.
If the author provided an email address or URL for general inquiries, it
is as follows:
http://www.stsci.edu/ftp/instrument_news/WFPC2/wfpc2_top.html