This page contains an overview of various deep HST exposures. The list is based on the Archived HST Exposure catalogue provided by MAST . At present only observations from 1993 and onwards are included. The current page includes information about all observations done until end 2007.
The procedure starts by sorting all observations on Proposal ID, filter and instrument config. We then add up these unique observations and calculate an overall potential exposure time. For many proposals this is far from the actual integration time per pixel, indeed for parallel fields it rarely is. Thus to get a better picture of the exposure time, an approximate exposure map is build up for each such combination. This is done using the V3 orientation provided in the AEC files as well as the pointing information. The map is calculated with a 0.1 arcminute resolution so structure on a scale smaller than this is not resolved but should not be of major interest. The maximum of this exposure map is then taken to be the true maximum integration time of that observing setup.
To visualise these exposures maps a small thumbnail is shown below which can be clicked to show larger images of each estimated exposure map belonging to each filter in that proposal.
Exposure maps are only calculated for proposals with more than 30,000 seconds total exposure time in a filter. We also exclude proposals where the images cover more than 5 degrees in either the RA or Dec direction because these are essentially all parallell observations and the exposure time per field is fairly short.
It makes more sense to present these lists one per instrument and only ACS, WFPC-2 and NIC3 has been included and only imaging observations (hopefully!).
Note that when calculating the effective exposure maps the detailed shape of the WFPC2 layout was not taken into account (ie. the layout was taken to be 160''x160'' square).
A set of full list of all WFPC, ACS & NIC3 exposures sorted on the total exposure time per filter per proposal and per config can also be found here.
In case someone would like to redo this. The merging etc was done using a Perl script utilizing PDL for making the exposure maps. The Perl script that makes the overall sorted catalogue from an AEC file (for a full list the different AEC's must be combined into onefile), can be downloaded together with a couple of small PDL function defintions in this gzipped tar file..