Overview of the New Hubble Spectroscopic Legacy Archive

TL;DR

The Hubble Spectroscopic Legacy Archive (HSLA) offers automatically updated, coadded spectra of targets observed with COS and STIS, including metadata and tools for custom analysis, enhancing data accessibility and usability.

Contribution

This paper introduces HSLA, a comprehensive archive that automates the creation of coadded spectra and provides tools and metadata for advanced astronomical research.

Findings

HSLA provides coadded spectra for targets observed over the Hubble lifetime.

The archive includes spectra for each observing mode and a full wavelength coverage spectrum.

Tools and code for custom coaddition are publicly available.

Abstract

The new Hubble Spectroscopic Legacy Archive (HSLA) provides coadded spectra of individual targets that have been observed with the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) over their operating lifetime. HSLA uses data available in the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). It automatically produces coadds whenever new data become publicly available or when there is newly recalibrated data. HSLA defines individual targets by their associated coordinates, accounting for proper motions, and uses SIMBAD, NED and the Phase II observing proposals to obtain astronomical classifications for each object. Coadded spectra are produced for each observing mode. In the case of COS far-ultraviolet observations there is one coadded spectrum for each lifetime position (LP). Additionally, a spectrum spanning the entire wavelength range covered by the observations is produced by abutting the spectra from a selection of individual modes. For each individual target, HSLA also provides a human-readable metadata file with key information that can be used in searches or for further exploration of the data. The HSLA project also makes the code used for coadding spectra publicly available along with several other tools (using Jupyter notebooks) for custom coaddition required in special cases. In this report we will describe the main components of HSLA and provide a brief description of how the data and metadata can be accessed.