ISR 2023-07: HSTaXe - ACS & WFC3 Cookbook Tutorials
September 19, 2023B. Kuhn, D. Som, A. Pidgeon, N. Hathi, R. Ryan, R. Avila, N. Pirzkal
This report describes a collection of six Jupyter Notebooks, released on the HSTaXe GitHub repository in Spring 2023, that demonstrate data reduction using STScI's official slitless spectroscopy software, HSTaXe. These 'cookbooks' present examples of how to preprocess data from ACS and WFC3 slitless-spectroscopic modes and use the core HSTaXe routines to extract 1D spectra. The specific preprocessing procedures explained here and in the cookbooks are meant to highlight three steps of the data analysis process users should consider to obtain optimal spectral extraction with HSTaXe. The three steps include a custom multi component background subtraction for WFC3/IR grism data, embedding subarray data into a full-chip image, and checking that the active World Coordinate System (WCS) of dispersed images matches the corresponding direct images. In addition to these preprocessing steps, we also address installation methods, the general cookbook workflow, advanced fluxcube extraction, and HSTaXe output files.