Introduction

Since the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) NICMOS camera was upgraded during Hubble Servicing Mission 3B (SM3B) a large amount of HST observations have been acquired over two areas of the sky: the Hubble Deep Field-North (HDF-N) and the Chandra Deep Field-South (CDF-S) GOODS fields. As a direct result of various Guest Observer, DDT and Parallel observing programs, there now exists over 1400 orbits of NICMOS imaging data in these two fields. As part of the Advanced Camera for Survey GTO Team project and an approved HST Archival program to search for the most distant galaxies we developed an automatic image reduction pipeline. With NICRED we have processed all HST NICMOS Camera 3 observations in these two fields.

Caveats

Currently it is only possible for NICRED to reduce data take after the NICMOS Cooling System (NCS) upgrade installed during the HST Servicing Mission 3B, in March, 2002. NICRED was primarily developed and optimized for reducing broad-band imaging data of extragalactic sources (such as imaging data taken for field galaxy surveys and galaxy cluster surveys). Other types imaging data have been reduced with NICRED but YMMV (See Troubleshooting for tips). NICRED is not designed to reduce slitless grism spectroscopy taken with the Multi-Object Spectrometer.

Prerequisites

These software must be install for NICRED to run:

Download

Download the nicred_latest.tgz file and the nicred_reffiles.tgz file.

Installing

  1. Unzip and untar the nicred files in a suitable location.

    • tar zxf nicred_X.X.X.tgz
    • ln -s nicred_X.X.X nicred
    • cd nicred
    • tar zxf nicred_reffiles.tgz
  2. Build the source

    • cd src
    • make
    • make install
  3. Edit nicred_setup script

    • Modify the NICRED_DIR and NICRED_PIPE in the nicred_setup.[sh][.csh] file in the NICRED bin directory

    • Add the nicred_setup.[sh][.csh] to your .bash_profile or .cshrc (.tcshrc)

      • Bash: . $NICRED_DIR/bin/nicred_setup.sh
      • CSH: source $NICRED_DIR/bin/nicred_setup.csh

Example nicred_setup.sh:

#------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# User Configurable Settings
#------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# source MacOSX SciSoft
. /Applications/scisoft/all/bin/Setup.bash

# path to NICRED directory
export NICRED_DIR=${HOME}/pipelines/nicred

# path to NICRED output data products
export NICRED_PIPE=${HOME}/Data

#------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Fixed Settings
#------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# path to NICRED reference files
export NICRED_REF=${NICRED_DIR}/NICRED_REF
export PATH=${PATH}:${NICRED_DIR}/bin
export PYTHONPATH=${PYTHONPATH}:${NICRED_DIR}/lib

Table Of Contents

Previous topic

NICRED - A NICMOS data reduction pipeline

Next topic

Running NICRED

This Page