hstaxe

hstaxe is a Python package to extract spectra from all slitless spectroscopy modes provided by the Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). It supports the features provided by the previous IRAF-based aXe package.

Installation

Requirements

hstaxe has the following Python requirements:

• Python 3.7 or later
• Numpy
• Astropy
• stwcs
• stsci.imagestats
• drizzlepac
• photutils < 1.1.0
• drizzle

In addition to the above Python packages, hstaxe depends on the following C-based packages to be installed:

• cfitsio
  • CFITSIO
• gsl
  • GSL
• wcstools
  • libwcs from wcstools

These packages must be installed in your environment before you can install hstaxe using pip or setup. They can be compiled and installed locally or installed using conda.

Installing hstaxe using conda

hstaxe can be installed with conda if you have installed Anaconda or Miniconda hstaxe is available via the Astroconda channel and can be installed by running:

conda install hstaxe -c https://ssb.stsci.edu/astroconda

Installing using pip

You will need a C compiler suite (e.g., gcc or clang) to build hstaxe via pip from either PyPI or from the source distribution. In addition to the above required packages, the following packages are required to build hstaxe:

• make
• automake
• autoconf
• libtool
• pkg-config

Note that you may also need to install the c-blosc package as a dependency of the tables package on certain platforms (e.g., this is currently needed for OSX and Windows with Python 3.9 due to missing tables wheels on PyPI).

After all of the required packages are installed, to install the latest released version of hstaxe with pip, run (NOTE this does not work for versions <= 1.0.0):

pip install hstaxe

The latest development version of the hstaxe source code can be retrieved and installed via:

git clone https://github.com/spacetelescope/hstaxe.git
cd hstaxe
pip install .

Note: using pip to install will quiet all build messages by default. If you would like to see the full output from all build commands, including the C compile statements, use pip install . -v

Examples

There are a couple simple test scripts in hstaxe/tests that can be run against the example data in the aXe cookbook:

• run_acs_cookbook.py: runs basic aXe against ACS data

• run_cookbook.py: runs basic aXe against WFC3 data from the cookbook

• run_cookbook_part2.py: runs axedrizzle against WFC3 data from the cookbook

• aXe_WFC3_Cookbook.ipynb: runs through a full WFC3 dataset cookbook style

The aXe WFC3 cookbook data can be downloaded by cloning this repository: https://github.com/npirzkal/aXe_WFC3_Cookbook

The aXe ACS cookbook and associated data can be downloaded from the following area: https://stsci.box.com/s/eo98zjtyccnoq7z73akfrx94jog3pg7j

Software Development History

This software was originally developed by the ACS group of the Space Telescope - European Coordinating Facility (ST-ECF). The ST-ECF is a department jointly run by the European Space Agency and the European Southern Observatory. It is located at the ESO headquarters at Garching near Munich. The ST-ECF staff supports the European astronomical community in exploiting the research opportunities provided by the earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope.

The developers have included, roughly in order of who has worked on the software:

Norbert Pirzkal, ST-ECF/STScI
Markus Demleitner, ST-ECF
Martin Kuemmel, ST-ECF
Richard Hook, ST-ECF/STScI
Howard Bushouse, STScI
Megan Sosey, STScI