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I. Heyer, J. Biretta, S. Baggett, S. Casertano, C. O'Dea, A. Schultz, S. Gonzaga, M. McMaster, M. Wiggs, A. Koekemoer, A. Riess (Space Telescope Science Institute)
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 after ~70000 images. Low level effects such as CTE and dark current continue to increase with long-term radiation exposure, but still affect only a minority of observations; work continues to characterize and monitor these effects. 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 in the field-of-view due to small focus variations. A new "on-the-fly calibration" feature of the HST archive allows instant re-calibration of WFPC2 data with the latest reference files; this should be a great benefit to both new observers and archival WFPC2 users. Recent results on polarization calibration, CTE, and other topics are discussed.
If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://www.stsci.edu/instruments/wfpc2/wfpc2_top.html. This link was provided by the author. When you follow it, you will leave the Web site for this meeting; to return, you should use the Back comand on your browser. [Previous] | [Session 85] | [Next]