About This Article
1. WFC3 at the 248th AAS Meeting
A. O'Connor
WFC3 will be at the 248th AAS Meeting in Pasadena, CA! We encourage AAS attendees to stop by our iPosters to learn about the current status of WFC3 and various improvements to the WFC3 calibration. We welcome your questions and feedback on proposing, analysis, documentation, or any other aspects of your experience with WFC3. Below, we provide session information and links to the the AAS meeting itinerary listings, where the abstracts can be found. Times are given in Pacific Time. We look forward to meeting you in Pasadena!
Seventeen Years of the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3: Calibration Overview- N. Grogin et al. Wednesday, June 17, 2026 | 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM
Reducing Systematic Errors in the WFC3 UVIS Photometric Calibration- A. Pidgeon et al. Wednesday, June 17, 2026 | 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM
Improved Charge Transfer Loss Correction and IR Blob Removal in HST/WFC3- J. Green et al. Tuesday, June 16, 2026 | 5:30 PM - 6:30 PM
2. Get Expert Support during WFC3 Office Hours
M. Revalski
The WFC3 team is constantly searching for avenues to better support the community in planning, executing, and analyzing their WFC3 observations. We recently launched the Hands-on Hubble video tutorial series, which includes a set of four videos that cover a range of WFC3 resources. In addition, users have always been welcome to submit their WFC3 questions via the HST Help Desk.
We are excited to advertise the addition of WFC3 “Office Hours” on the first Thursday of every month at 11:00am eastern time. This provides members of the community with an opportunity to join a WFC3 expert live on Webex to more quickly iterate on general and technical questions related to every aspect of the WFC3 instrument. Users of all experience levels are encouraged to join with their questions about the instrument, observations, calibration, and analysis tools.
Please visit the HST Video Tutorials webpage for a list of upcoming dates and the Webex link.
Don’t be shy, we look forward to meeting you!
3. Transition from HSTaXe to Slitlessutils for HST Slitless Spectroscopy
B. Kuhn and the HST Grism Working Group
STScI is transitioning its support for HST slitless spectroscopic analysis to slitlessutils, which will now serve as the officially supported software package for working with wide‑field slitless data from both WFC3 and ACS. Slitlessutils provides a unified, forward‑modeling framework for preparing, extracting, and simulating slitless spectra across all active HST configurations. As part of this transition, HSTaXe is being retired; it will remain available for archival reference, but it will no longer receive updates, maintenance, or Help Desk support. Users are encouraged to adopt slitlessutils for all new and ongoing analyses to ensure compatibility with current calibrations and to have access to future improvements.
To support this transition, the WFC3 team has released a new set of slitlessutils tutorials in the form of Jupyter notebooks. These examples guide users through the recommended workflow for analyzing slitless data, including preparing direct and dispersed images, performing background subtraction, and executing the traditional extraction mode. The tutorials are designed to both familiarize users with the slitlessutils framework and provide practical, end-to-end guidance that reflects common scientific use cases. The notebooks are available in the spacetelescope/hst_notebooks GitHub repository and are organized into three instrument-specific tutorials: WFC3/IR, WFC3/UVIS subarray, and WFC3/UVIS full-frame.
Slitlessutils continues to evolve, with ongoing development to expand observatory coverage (e.g., JWST and Roman) and to refine its capabilities (e.g., handling ACS/SBC prism data). Users can now explore the new tutorials in the hst_notebooks repository, as well as the full documentation for slitlessutils on Read the Docs. We welcome feedback from the community on the software’s performance as well as suggestions for code enhancements via the repository and/or the HST Help Desk. For additional information on HST slitless spectroscopy, including calibration details and instrument‑specific resources, please visit the WFC3 Grism Resources page.
4. New Documentation
ISR 2026-01: Updates to the WFC3/IR Photometric Stability Stellar Cluster Study - K. Huynh & V. Bajaj
The complete WFC3 ISR archive is available here. Additional information about WFC3 calibration, performance, data analysis, software tools, and more can be found online.
Need help? stsci.service-now.com/hst
To subscribe to the WFC3_NEWS list, please send a blank email to WFC3_NEWS-subscribe-request@MAILLIST.STSCI.EDU
To unsubscribe from the WFC3_NEWS list, please send a blank email to WFC3_NEWS-signoff-request@MAILLIST.STSCI.EDU