NICMOS Documents

Instrument Handbook	The Instrument Handbook is the primary guide to the characteristics and use of the instrument. It is also available in PDF format (6.58 MB).
Data Handbook	The Data Handbook is the primary guide to the calibration and analysis of NICMOS data.
Previous Handbooks	These archived handbooks were written for Cycles 15 and earlier.
Instrument Science Reports	ISRs are technical reports written by the NICMOS Group staff about various aspects of the instrument and data. They usually contain in depth information about a specific topic.
Papers	NICMOS related papers.
STAN	NICMOS Space Telescope Analysis Newsletters.
Advisories	NICMOS Advisories.

New in the Last 45 Days

NICMOS ISR 2008-002: Improvements to Calnica
This ISR describes a number of improvements to calnica, the STSDAS task that performs routine instrumental calibration of NICMOS raw images. We report two major and a number of minor updates to the code. The major updates consist of changes in the way the count rate is calculated from up-the-ramp fitting and changes in the cosmic rays rejection algorithm. All updates have been extensively tested and analysis shows improvement in the S/N of output images by 6-15% compared to the previous calnica version. A further improvement is that the error extension in the calibrated images now represents the true errors in a more consistent way compared to the old implementation of the software.
T. Dahlen 04 Jun 2008 (pdf)