List of Overexposed Spectra

Last Updated 20 December 2004

The following is a complete list of observations which are overexposed in part of the observed spectrum. The list was made by checking the raw HST data for pixels with values over 30,000 counts. Saturated pixels which were caused by cosmic ray hits or hot pixels were ignored in this analysis.

The problem with using the DQ array to identify these files is that the Goddard version of CALSTIS which our reduction pipeline was built on does not save an audit trail for each pixel but instead saves the worst thing that happened to that pixel in the reduction process. As a result the fact that a pixel is saturated often ends up replaced with some "worse" flag. We aren't entirely happy with this and we are considering several work arounds. Until those come, there is this list to alert you to possible saturation problems.

The column listing the number of saturated pixels is included to give a hint as to the degree that observation is over exposed. The more saturated pixels, the more overexposed the spectrum is.

A star (*) beside the Version 1.2 name denotes that data is an overexposed long exposure which has no corresponding short exposure to compare with. Therefore, the bad pixels in those datasets have not been identified in the database.