Page History
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2025 May 7: See the MAST Notebook Repository for updated versions of all the HSC Jupyter notebooks. Coming soon: A new version of the HSC! HSC version 4 will be based on data from the Hubble Advanced Products and will include 8 years of new Hubble observations acquired since the creation of HSCv3. Watch this space for more details.
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The HCV was created from HSCv3 in a 4 year ESA-funded project at the National Observatory of Athens (PI: Alceste Bonanos). It is available for download via the HLSP page and is also fully integrated with the MAST user interfaces for the HSC, including the HSC CasJobs and VO TAP database query interfaces and the MAST catalogs simple form interface and query API. There are Python Jupyter notebooks available that show how to access the data in scripts. The ESAC Science Data Centre has created the HCV Explorer, a new online web tool to access, visualize, and interactively explore the HCV.
Note that the HCV includes improved magnitudes with local corrections for objects that were searched for variability (those with at least 5 epochs available in some HST filter), so this data may also be useful for projects that are not primarily focused on variability. See the HCV journal paper (Bonanos et al., 2019, A&A, 630, A92) for more details on the project.- 2019 June 26: HSC version 3.1 was released. It adds to the current HSC version 3.0 by providing proper motions of over 400,000 objects in the augmented Sagittarius Window Eclipsing Extrasolar Planet Search (SWEEPS) HST field. This field is within a few degrees of the Galactic center, and most of the stars belong to the Galactic bulge. The field has been observed by ACS and WFC3 with a time baseline as long as 12 years. The proper motion information is available in the form of database tables within the HSCv3 context of the STScI CasJobs interface. The data can be readily queried by means of SQL through that interface. In addition, we provide a Python Jupyter notebook that shows how to access CasJobs via a script. The notebook provides statistical information about the photometry and proper motions and includes some science use cases. More details are found hereat HSCv3 Hubble Source Catalog SWEEPS Proper Motions.
- 2018 July 5: HSC version 3 was released. It includes many improvements in the photometry and astrometry along with a significant increase in the number of objects and measurements.
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- The MAST Discovery Portal provides a one-stop web access to a wide variety of astronomical data. Select "Hubble Source Catalog v3" in the Select Collection dropdown menu, enter your search target, click Search, and you are on your way. Please try the Use Case Using the Discovery Portal to Query the HSC.
- The HSC CasJobs interface permits you to run large and complex queries, expressed in the Structured Query Language (SQL). Note that it is not difficult to run CasJobs queries from Python script. See the Python Jupyter notebook developed for HSC v3.1 and the Hubble Catalog of Variables notebook for examples.
- The HSC TAP service provides database query access to the HSC through the Virtual Observatory Table Access Protocol (TAP). It is described in more detail in an article in the May 2018 MAST Newsletter. If interested in accessing the older HSC Version 2 via TAP, you may do so using this TAP service. There is a Python Jupyter notebook that demonstrates how to query the HSC databases using TAP.
The MAST catalogs interface provides a simple but powerful search interface for the HSC and other catalogs (including Pan-STARRS). It includes a user interface for searches at a sky position with optional filtering by catalog parameters and customization of the columns. It also incorporates an API for scripted queries of the catalogs.Anchor forms forms - The new HSC search interface has a single web form that allows searching different tables chosen from either the v3 or v2 releases of the HSC catalog. This single page replaces four different web forms from the older HSC search interface.
- Select the HSC Summary Table to display a single row entry for each object, as defined by a set of detections that have been cross-matched and hence are believed to be a single object. Median values for magnitudes, positions, and other relevant parameters are provided.
- Select the HSC Detailed Table to display an entry for each separate detection (or nondetection if nothing is found at that position) using all the relevant Hubble observations for a given object (i.e., different filters, detectors, separate visits).
- See our Python Jupyter notebooks for some simple examples that show how to use the HSC API services. Another simple Another Python notebook generates a color-magnitude diagram of the Small Magellanic Cloud with 750,000 objects in only a couple of minutes. A more advanced notebook demonstrates the ability to perform large queries that return 500,000 rows of data from the SWEEPS proper motion data. There is also an Hubble Catalog of Variables notebook that shows how to find variable objects and show their light curves and images.
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We are interested in your feedback. If you have questions, or items to bring to our attention, please send them to : archive help (mailto: archive@stsci.edu).
HSC Data Use Policy:
The HSC is based on data from the Hubble Legacy Archive (HLA). Refereed publications making use of the HSC should therefore include this footnote in the acknowledgements:
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