ACS Software Tools
Introduction
Calibration Tools
The calibration of detector effects (e.g. bias subtraction, dark subtraction, flat-fielding) is handled by the ACS calibration pipeline, CALACS. CALACS is packaged together with the various calibration pipelines used by each of the instrument teams (e.g. CALCOS, CALSTIS, and CALWF3) into single software package called HSTCAL. This package is distributed via the AstroConda Channel maintained by the Space Telescope Sciene Institute. The CALACS package is written entirely in C and the complied executables may be run from the command line. For users more comfortable working in python, the ACS Team developed the python package, ACSTOOLS, which is a wrapper around the underlying CALACS executables. For more information click the link below.
Analysis Tools
When analyzing ACS data, there are many things to consider depending on the analysis performed and the dataset being used. The ACS Team has identified some of the most common problems users face during this process and created a series of jupyter notebooks and webtools to address them. The notebooks are essentially "HowTo" articles that show you how to solve each problem in an interactive manner. They have minimal dependencies and are intended to run in the standard astroconda environment. The webtools are standalone applications that can be accessed from anywhere and have no dependencies. For more information click the link below.