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Introduction

A unique capability of the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrograph (NICMOS) that is on board of Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is its grism mode, which permits slitless spectrometry at low resolution. Typically, a direct image is taken in conjunction with grism images for the wavelength calibration. A quick-look extraction of spectra from a large number of NICMOS grism images requires a convenient interactive tool which manipulates the pair of images and extracts spectra. NICMOSlook is an IDL program designed for that purpose at the Space Telescope - European Coordinating Facility . NICMOSlook is the interactive counterpart to the Calnic C Facility , a program which performs the same function in a "pipelined" approach. The most common uses for NICMOSlook will be for small amounts of data, when users prefer to have full control of all parameters for individual spectrum extraction, or for cases which Calnic C did not extract spectra in a satisfactory way. Unlike Calnic C, NICMOSlook requires the user to determine the best way to find an object and provides a number of different ways to accomplish this. Similarly, the user decides whether weighting appropriate for point sources or weighting by the size of the object is used for the extraction of the spectra. The actual extraction of spectra is done employing the same methods and algorithms as Calnic C (Refer to the chapter regarding Algorithms in the Calnic C manual for detailed descriptions.)


next up previous contents
Next: Brief overview of the Up: No Title Previous: Contents
Wolfram Freudling
4/26/1999