The Multimission Archive at STScI Newsletter

The latest version of StarView is now available at http://starview.stsci.edu. If you have an individual installation, StarView will upgrade automatically, with your permission. If you have a system-wide installation, your local starview admin will be notified in advance for installation.

This latest version has many improvements:

• Much faster search performance.
• Compatible with both Java 1.3 and 1.2.2.
• Literature search for the first publication of an HST dataset, based on a table maintained manually at STScI and linked to the ADS.
• Improved help options, including a "Help with next step" for the newest users.
• A "Quick" button that displays the "Quick" search form, as the most commonly used form in StarView.

The most significantly new feature is the ability to display individual apertures on a DSS image, in conjunction with the Astronomer's Proposal Tool / Visual Target Tuner (VTT). This feature allows the outlines of the individual apertures used in multiple HST observations to be overlaid. Multiple aperture can be selected for overlay, so that an entire table of apertures of a mosaic could be displayed and examined. JIPA is still available for previews, and can be used as the usual complete FOV-display if the user does not desire to use the VTT. In April's release of StarView, VTT would need to be installed separately and you will have to modify StarView's lax file to include the class path to VTT. But by early May, VTT and StarView can be installed bundled together, so you will not need to download both VTT and StarView. You will of course be able to run either program separately (without loading both into memory). This is a required feature in both programs since they are both memory intensive applications.

As of mid-April, WFPC2 and STIS data will be reprocessed rather than re-calibrated as that data are requested from the HST archive. OTFR is "On the fly Reprocessing." Processing starts from the POD files (telemetry packets) as received from GSFC as opposed to calibration, which starts from the "raw" FITS files. The extra step is generic conversion, which translates data from telemetry to FITS files. The users should notice very little difference in the products from OTFR. Since the data are reprocessed from scratch rather than repaired, a new trailer file will be produced and a ``delta'' file describing the change in keyword values from the initial processing pass and now will no longer be produced. The OTFR system will use the best available calibration files and the most recent version of the processing and calibration software. As in OTFC, you can examine which reference files will be used in OTFR using the reference files search screen for the appropriate instrument in StarView. (Use the Search menu and pull down to New Format Screens > Instruments > WFPC2 > Reference Files to bring up that search screen.)