STIS Performance

STIS performance data include measured point spread functions, spatial profiles, line spread functions, total system throughput, sensitivity curves and calculators, internal and external background levels, photometric and astrometric accuracies. Anomalies are also described in pages accessible via the navigation bar at left. Historical descriptions of calibration programs are available.

		Performance Updates
		Scaling Side-2 CCD Dark Frames with Temperature Due to a failure of the STIS primary (Side-1) electronics, the redundant (Side-2) electronics have been in use since July 2001. The redundant electronics allow larger fluctuations in CCD temperature, resulting in significant variations in CCD dark rate Eventually, dark subtraction in the archive pipeline will automatically handle dark rate variations, but for now darks can be scaled manually as a function of temperature. As a proxy for CCD detector temperature, the CCD housing temperature (CCDHTAV) will be added to STIS science headers. Until this keyword is available, we will maintain a CCD housing temperature log. For complete information read more.

		Additional Performance Information
		Kimble et al. (1998, ApJL, 492, L83) describes the on-orbit performance of STIS shortly after launch.

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