NICMOSlook
[frame|Screenshot of NICMOSlook]
NICMOSlook is an IDL programme for data analysis designed at the Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility (ST-ECF). It is an interactive tool for the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) on board the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). One of the capabilities of NICMOS is its grism mode for slitless spectrometry at low resolution. Typically, a direct image is taken in conjunction with grism images for wavelength calibration. A quick-look extraction of spectra from a large number of NICMOS grism images requires a convenient interactive tool that manipulates the image pair and extracts spectra. NICMOSlook is designed for that purpose.
NICMOSlook is the interactive counterpart to the “Calnic C” Facility, a program that performs the same function in a "pipelined" approach. 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.