English

Overview of the New Hubble Spectroscopic Legacy Archive

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2026-05-07 v1

Abstract

The new Hubble Spectroscopic Legacy Archive (HSLA) provides coadded spectra of individual targets that have been observed with the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) over their operating lifetime. HSLA uses data available in the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). It automatically produces coadds whenever new data become publicly available or when there is newly recalibrated data. HSLA defines individual targets by their associated coordinates, accounting for proper motions, and uses SIMBAD, NED and the Phase II observing proposals to obtain astronomical classifications for each object. Coadded spectra are produced for each observing mode. In the case of COS far-ultraviolet observations there is one coadded spectrum for each lifetime position (LP). Additionally, a spectrum spanning the entire wavelength range covered by the observations is produced by abutting the spectra from a selection of individual modes. For each individual target, HSLA also provides a human-readable metadata file with key information that can be used in searches or for further exploration of the data. The HSLA project also makes the code used for coadding spectra publicly available along with several other tools (using Jupyter notebooks) for custom coaddition required in special cases. In this report we will describe the main components of HSLA and provide a brief description of how the data and metadata can be accessed.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.04167,
  title  = {Overview of the New Hubble Spectroscopic Legacy Archive},
  author = {Ravi Sankrit and John Debes and Matthew Burger and Van Dixon and Anna Payne and Leonardo Dos Santos and Thomas Wevers and Travis Fischer and Peter Forshay and Svea Hernandez and Robert Jedrzejewski and Rich Kidwell and Lauren Miller and Marc Rafelski and David Rodriguez and Robert Swaters and Dan Welty and Sara Anderson and Thomas Bair and Joleen Carlberg and Brian Charlow and Andrew Cortese and Tracy Ellis and Ben Falk and Scott Fleming and Elaine Frazer and Syed Gilani and Alec Hirschauer and Talya Kelley and Tim Kimball and Jennifer Kotler and Adrian Lucy and Sunita Malla and Christopher Rahmani and Fred Romelfanger and Kate Rowlands and Lisa Sherbert},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.04167},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

35 pages, 10 figures