ESA Hubble Announcement | 2019 Sep 24
ESA/Hubble is pleased to announce the release of the Hubble Catalog of Variables (HCV), the first full, homogeneous catalogue of variable sources based on archival HST data. The HCV was developed over four years by a team of astronomers at the National Observatory of Athens, led by Alceste Bonanos and sponsored by ESA in collaboration with STScI.
The HCV is now available to the community via the ESA Hubble Science Archive (eHST) at ESAC and MAST at STScI, and can easily be explored using the HCV Explorer, a visualisation tool developed at ESAC specifically to navigate the HCV and look up your favorite object(s) or field(s)!
Despite not being a survey telescope, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has obtained multi-epoch observations under multiple, diverse observing programmes. This provides the opportunity for a comprehensive variability search that aims to uncover new variables over a range of magnitudes that is difficult to reach with ground-based telescopes. The magnitude depth and the superb resolution achieved by Hubble, along with the long time-baseline of its operation, are the features that make such a variable source catalogue unique. The Hubble Source Catalog (HSC), which is built out of publicly available images obtained with the WFPC2, ACS and WFC3 instruments, provides photometric measurements of all sources detected from a homogeneous reduction and analysis of Hubble archival images, thereby enabling such a variability search. ...
The Hubble Catalog of Variables (HCV) ~ A. Z. Bonanos et al
- Astronomy & Astrophysics (accepted 05 Aug 2019) DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201936026
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1909.10757 > 24 Sep 2019