NICMOSlook is a computer program to analyze spectral data obtained with the
Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) on board the
Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The program originated as ''Calnic C'', which was designed at the
Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility
right
The Space Telescope – European Coordinating Facility (ST-ECF) was an institution which provided a number of support and service functions primarily for European observers of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope (HST). It was established in 1 ...
(ST-ECF) and programmed in
IDL
IDL may refer to:
Computing
* Interface description language, any computer language used to describe a software component's interface
** IDL specification language, the original IDL created by Lamb, Wulf and Nestor at Queen's University, Canada
...
. NICMOSlook is available from their website.
One of the capabilities of NICMOS is its
grism
A grism (also called a grating prism) is a combination of a prism and grating arranged so that light at a chosen central wavelength passes straight through. The advantage of this arrangement is that one and the same camera can be used both for imag ...
mode for slitless spectrometry at low resolution. Typically, a direct image is taken in conjunction with grism images for wavelength calibration. NICMOSlook is a highly specialized interactive tool to extract
one-dimensional spectra (flux versus wavelength) from such data.
NICMOSlook is most commonly used for small amounts of data when users prefer to have full control of all the parameters for individual spectrum extraction, or for cases where Calnic C did not extract the spectra satisfactorily. 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 to use a weighting appropriate for point sources or weighting by the size of the object for the extraction of the spectra.
Calnic C
''Calnic C'' is a non-interactive counterpart, a program that performs a subset of NICMOSlook's functions with a "pipelined" approach. Maintenance of Calnic C stopped in 2000 and the program is now considered to be obsolete.
External links
ST-ECF page for NICMOSlook
{{Hubble Space Telescope
Hubble Space Telescope
Astronomy software