1.7	Non-proprietary STIS Data

During regular STIS operations, the majority of existing STIS data is non-proprietary and available for retrieval from the HST Data Archive. The data include, but are not limited to, observations obtained as ERO observations, the STIS Archival Pure Parallel Program, the ongoing calibration programs (see Chapter 17), data taken in connection with the Hubble Deep Fields (North,  South, and Ultra Deep Fields), and GTO and GO observations that are no longer proprietary. You can use the HST Archive Web interface to search for such data directly. Any such data may be freely acquired, as described in the STIS Data Handbook, for technical or scientific use. Examples of non-proprietary STIS science data are shown as illustrative examples interspersed in this Handbook. At present, all STIS data taken prior to the Side-2 failure on 2004-Aug-03 are non-proprietary.

All STIS data collected prior to the Side-2 failure were reprocessed through a modified version of the ingest pipeline, and the archive databases were repopulated. This allowed any changes in the processing software and reference file updates effective at the time of reprocessing to be reflected in the archive catalog. Unlike during original ingest, during this recalibration all raw and calibrated data files produced were saved. This static archive has now been made available to the community in place of OTFR (On-the-Fly-Recalibration). This will allow old STIS data obtained prior to the failure in 2004 to be retrieved without waiting for the OTFR procedures to run. It should be noted that any changes to the software or reference files made after the 2006 reprocessing will not be reflected in the static archive. See also:

http://archive.stsci.edu/hstonline/.

As part of this STIS re-calibration and re-ingest, those science exposures that lacked auto-wavecals, but for which GO wavecals are available, were identified, and the science data and lamp exposures were combined into associations that treat the GO wavecals in the same way as auto-wavecals.

As a side effect of the association of GO wavecals, the science exposures involved have new dataset names, and the lamp exposures now used as wavecals will no longer appear in the archive catalog as independent datasets.

New STIS data taken after the 2009 repair will be processed through OTFR when requested from the HST archive. This will allow the data to be calibrated with the most up-to-date versions of the software and reference files. GO wavecals will now be associated with the corresponding science exposures in the same manner as auto-wavecal exposures and will not appear in the archive catalog as independent datasets.

During the echelle scattered-light correction applied through the OTFR procedures, the net and background arrays could get out of sync if the Photometric Conversion Table (PHOTTAB) does not include an entry for every spectral order that was on the detector. If the order is not in the calibration data, the software automatically includes it in the PHOTTAB with a pedigree of DUMMY, which allows the order to be extracted. As noted previously, this change in software will not apply to the statically archived version of STIS data taken before the 2009 repair, although it can be applied by recalibrating the raw data files with CALSTIS.