Hubble Space Telescope Primer for Cycle 17

7.3 Hubble Legacy Archive (HLA)

The Hubble Legacy Archive (HLA) is a new project designed to enhance science from the Hubble Space Telescope by augmenting the HST Data Archive and by providing advanced browsing capabilities. It is a joint project of the Space Telescope Science Institute, the European Coordinating Facility, and the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre. The primary enhancements are:

• the data are online, hence available for immediate access,
• a footprint service makes it easier to browse and download images,
• more extensive "composite images" (e.g., stacked, color, mosaics) are being developed,
• the absolute astrometry has been improved from 1 - 2 arcsec to ~0.3 arcsec,
• source lists are available for many fields,
• NICMOS grism extractions are being produced by ST-ECF.

At this writing, the project is currently in its Early Data Release phase, with roughly 20% of the ACS data and 10% of the NICMOS grism data available. However, the footprint service shows data for ACS, WFPC2, and STIS. Data Release 1 is currently planned for the Winter 2007 and will include nearly all non-proprietary ACS data and NICMOS grism data. Future releases will include "ACS-like'' products for WFPC2 data (i.e., cosmic-ray rejected, multidrizzle combined), NICMOS and STIS images, a variety of spectroscopic products, and a more advanced user interface and search capability. Some of the more general goals of the HLA are to make HST data VO (Virtual Observatory) compatible, to move toward a sky atlas user view rather than a collection of datasets, and to develop an "all-HST-sky" source list.

The HLA can be accessed at http://hla.stsci.edu.