| odelaytime | stsdas.hst_calib.stis | odelaytime |
odelaytime -- Correct for light delay time for STIS time-tag data.
odelaytime input earth_ephem obs_ephem distance dist_unit
The Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) aboard the Space Telescope is capable of timing observations to a temporal resolution of 125 microseconds. The effects on the observed times of both the orbital motions of the Earth and the telescope may need to be corrected to the solar-system barycenter. This task modifies a STIS file in-place to correct for light delay from three sources: (1) general relativistic effects (up to 2 milliseconds), (2) displacement of the telescope from the center of the Earth (up to 20 milliseconds), (3) and displacement of the Earth from the solar-system barycenter (up to 500 seconds).
Most of the description below refers to time-tag events tables. This task may also be applied to files of 1-D extracted spectra or files containing image sets, in which case only the headers will be modified.
Running this task results in changes to header keywords and to the TIME column (parameter in_col). The light delay time correction at the beginning (end) of the exposure will be added to the keywords TEXPSTRT (TEXPEND) in the primary header, and to EXPSTART (EXPEND) in each EVENTS table header. A correction relative to the exposure start time will be added to the TIME column in every EVENTS table. Note that these changes are in-place and are not reversible.
In files created by Generic Conversion, the TIME column is actually a 32-bit integer with scaling parameters TSCAL1 and TZERO1, so it will be interpreted as double precision by the table I/O software. However, the accuracy is limited by the TSCAL1 increment, which is 0.000125 second.
The START and STOP columns in the GTI table extension will be modified in the same way as the values in the TIME column.
A header keyword DELAYCOR with a value "COMPLETE" will be written to the primary header. Two HISTORY records will be added, one to say that the times have been corrected, and the other to give the name of the obs_ephem (ORB) table. If odelaytime is called on a file that already has DELAYCOR = "COMPLETE", a message will be printed, and no further correction will be applied.
The STIS-specific aspects of this task are the header keywords and the fact that the values in the TIME column are relative to the exposure start time.
This task relies on NEXTEND in the primary header for the total number of extensions in the file. The input files are assumed to be FITS format.
The keywords TEXPSTRT, TEXPEND and DELAYCOR in the primary header will be updated, and a HISTORY record will be added. The EXPSTART and EXPEND keywords in each EVENTS extension (or each image extension) will also be updated. For image extensions (as opposed to EVENTS tables), only the SCI extensions normally have the EXPSTART and EXPEND keywords. They can be present in ERR or DQ extensions as well, however, and in that case these headers will also be updated.
For a file with 1-D extracted spectra or image sets, only the headers will be modified. For time-tag events tables, however, the times in the in_col column will also be modified.
"JD" Julian Day Number corresponding to X,Y,Z (double). "X" X component of the state vector (double). "Y" Y component of the state vector (double). "Z" Z component of the state vector (double).
The time of each state vector in the table will be converted to MJD by subtracting 2400000.5. The times need not be uniformly spaced, but they must be strictly increasing.
"TIME" time for X,Y,Z, relative to FIRSTMJD (double).
"X" X component of the state vector (double).
"Y" Y component of the state vector (double).
"Z" Z component of the state vector (double).
and the following table header keyword:
"FIRSTMJD" Epoch of the first row in the table, in
modified Julian date (double).
The time of each state vector in the table is an offset relative to the FIRSTMJD table header keyword. The unit for the TIME column must be specified; recognized units are DAY, HOUR or HR, MIN*, S*. The times will be converted to MJD by converting to days and adding the value of FIRSTMJD. The times need not be uniformly spaced, but they must be strictly increasing.
For HST observations, this can be obtained from the 2 or 3 day HST ephemeris (ORB) files. More than one ORB file will be required if an observation crosses the boundary between the end of one ORB file and the beginning of the next. When specifying more than one input file, a list of ORB files may be specified for obs_ephem in order to cover the range of times in all the input files.
1. Apply light time corrections to the barycenter of the solar system, in the file "o12345jct_tag.fits". Use the Earth ephemeris "de200.fits" and the HST ephemeris "hst.tab". Assume that the target has zero parallax.
cl> odelaytime o12345jct_tag.fits de200.fits hst.tab 0 arcsec
2. Process all time-tag files in the default directory, using the default Earth ephemeris table, the HST ephemeris "hst.tab", and zero parallax.
cl> odelaytime *_tag.fits stsdas$data/fits/de200.fits hst.tab 0 arcsec