|
|
|
Development of an IUE Time Series browser
|
|
|
| The International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE) satellite operated successfully for 17 years. Its archive of more than 100,000 science exposures is widely acknowledged as an invaluable scientific resource that will not be duplicated in the foreseeable future. We have searched this archive for objects which were observed 10 or more times with the same wavelength coverage and spectral dispersion over the lifetime of the satellite. Using this definition of a time series, we demonstrate that roughly half of the more than 100,000 science exposures are members of such time series.identifying these datasets and developing a means to easily examine them in order to determine which objects varied over the lifetime of IUE would be an extremely useful scientific asset. We have already identified the datasets and developed a prototype for a browser which operates over the web. The browser enables the researcher to visually inspect the repeated observations for variability and to examine each member spectrum individually. Further, once the researcher ascertains whether a specific dataset is worthy of further investigation, the entire dataset can be downloaded through links on the browser page for further scrutiny on the researcher's home computer. This project will produce a fully operational version of the browser. |
|
|
