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2025 June 13: The HLA cart and HLA footprint viewer no longer work. Minimal
maintenance is being done on the HLA interface because all HLA
functionality and data products will soon be available in the new MAST
Hubble search interface.
At that point,
the HLA interface will
be retired. Note that the HLA products will still be available.
Click on data links to immediately download data.
If you need footprints, we recommend using the MAST Portal.
Note that both the Portal and the new search interface also provide access to the
Hubble Advanced Products (HAP), which include HLA-style products for more recent
observations. The HLA contains no observations acquired after 2017 October 1.
Welcome to the Hubble Legacy Archive
The Hubble Legacy Archive (HLA) is designed to optimize science from
the Hubble Space Telescope by providing online, enhanced Hubble
products and advanced browsing capabilities. The HLA is a joint
project of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the Space
Telescope European Coordinating Facility (ST-ECF), and the Canadian
Astronomy Data Centre (CADC).
The Hubble Catalog of Variables (HCV), a major new
High-Level Science Product derived from the Hubble Source Catalog,
was released. The HCV is the first homogeneous catalog of variable sources found in the HSC. It
includes variable stars in our Galaxy and nearby galaxies, as well as transients and variable
active galactic nuclei.
The HCV is fully integrated with the MAST
user interfaces for the HSC, including
the HSC CasJobs and
VO TAP database query interfaces and the
MAST catalogs simple form interface and query API.
There are Python Jupyter notebooks
available that show how to access the data in scripts. The
ESAC Science Data Centre has created the
HCV Explorer, a new online web tool to
access, visualize, and interactively explore the HCV.
Hubble Source Catalog Version 3.1 (2019 June 27)
HSC version 3.1 was released on 2019 June 26. It adds
proper motions of over 400,000 objects in the
SWEEPS field. The proper motion
information is available in database tables within the HSCv3
context of the STScI CasJobs interface.
We also provide a
Python Jupyter notebook
that queries the HSCv3 database through a Python
interface to CasJobs. More details about HSC v3.1 are found
here.
HLA DR10.1 and Hubble Source Catalog Version 3 (2018 July 5)
NEW DATA PRODUCTS
Source lists from HLA DR10 have been combined to create version 3 of the Hubble Source Catalog. See the
HSC Home Page for details and data access links.
There are approximately 25% more ACS source lists and almost twice as many WFC3 source lists compared with HSC v2.
The source list photometric quality is significantly improved.
Improved astrometric calibration is based on the Gaia DR1 catalog. Shifts up to 100 arcsec have been correctly identified. 94% of the fields have matches to an external astrometric reference catalog.
The scatter in magnitudes is measured using the median absolute deviation (MAD) of the differences from the median magnitude for more robust estimates.
USER INTERFACE ENHANCEMENTS
HSCv3 astrometric corrections are used for image cutouts and in the interactive display.
The HSCv3 catalog is available for overlay in the interactive display. The older HSCv2 and HSCv1 catalogs
are also accessible using the HSC Controls in the interactive display.
HLA DR10 Release (2018 January 8)
NEW DATA PRODUCTS
All ACS and WFC3 data that were public as of 2017 October 1 have
been processed.
The new image processing pipeline fixes numerous data problems,
including corrections for alignment shifts between exposures and a better
algorithm for combining short and long exposures. The new source lists have
more reliable photometry due both to the image improvements and to better
tuning of parameters for the catalog software. All old ACS and WFC3
images have been replaced in this release. These new
source lists were used for version 3 of the
Hubble Source Catalog,
which was released in July 2018.
New deep, wide-field ACS and WFC3 multi-visit mosaic data products have been generated for
1348 fields. The new mosaic pipeline is based on the processing used for
the Hubble Frontier Fields images. These images are astrometrically
corrected and aligned using
HSC version 2. ACS and WFC3
products are drizzled onto a common pixel grid, which makes them easy to use.
USER INTERFACE ENHANCEMENTS
Previews and the interactive display handle photon-counting detectors such as the
ACS/SBC better.
Color images for mosaic data products can combine ACS/WFC, WFC3/UVIS and
WFC3/IR images.
The PanSTARRS DR1 catalog is included for overlay in the interactive display.
See the release notes for more details on these and past releases.
HLA ESSENTIALS
The HLA interface runs in Firefox,
Safari,
Chrome,
Internet Explorer
(versions 8* and 9),
and similar compatible browsers. *IE8 limitations - the scatterplot and plotting tools do not work on IE8 as it does not support HTML5.
To fully realize all of the HLA's functionality, one must have
cookies and popups enabled.
The HLA includes enhanced data products (ACS, WFC3, WFPC2
& NICMOS images; ACS, WFC3 & WFPC2 source lists; ACS &
NICMOS extracted grism spectra; ACS & WFC3 deep/wide mosaic images) and
also provides access to the standard HST data products when
HLA enhanced products have not yet been created.
Footprints, which graphically display
the sky coverage on a background
image from the Digitized Sky Survey, are available for both standard
and enhanced HST data products, including extracted grism spectra
and community-contributed high-level science products.
Here is a matrix describing what is and is not in the HLA:
Instrument/Product
Source
HLA Enhanced Products
1
Download
Format
Interactive
Display?
Notes:
Fraction of all HST data for which the
HLA currently includes enhanced products.
Note that the HLA searches and footprints also
include standard products. Proprietary data
and other data not yet processed by the HLA
project are available through
DADS
requests
(which may also be submitted using the HLA
cart). Observations with guide star acquisition failures,
zero exposure times, and similar problems are excluded.
Some observing modes (moving targets, spatial scans, grisms,
ramp filters, etc.) are processed only as single exposures
rather than being combined.
Contains essentially all ACS
data publicly available through 2017 October 1.
Also includes almost all data from the
HRC, which
ceased operation in January 2007.
This is the fraction of HLA-processed ACS/WFC and ACS/HRC visits that have
at least one SExtractor or DAOphot catalog. The fraction for ACS/WFC alone is
higher (98%). These fractions exclude visits that are too heavily contaminated
by cosmic rays to be usable for catalogs due to poor observing strategies.
There are 47,919 extracted ACS grism from 153 archival fields. The most recent data included in
the ACS grism were taken in February 2006.
This is the fraction of HLA-processed WFPC2 visits that have
at least one SExtractor or DAOphot catalog.
Contains almost all WFC3 data
publicly available through 2017 October 1.
This is the fraction of HLA-processed WFC3 visits that have
at least one SExtractor or DAOphot catalog.
These fractions exclude visits that are too heavily contaminated
by cosmic rays to be usable for catalogs due to poor observing strategies.
Reprocessed NICMOS data through the
latest STScI calibration pipeline. Data requiring SAAClean have undergone additional
processing and have now been released. See the
NICMOS
Data Handbook for details.
Enhanced data products have been produced for some of the Early
Release Observation COS data and have been included in the HLA,
together with similar WFC3 data.
As for other HST instruments, standard raw and calibrated products
for non-proprietary COS data are available through both
the MAST
and the HLA interfaces.
