Data Structures and Algorithms for Pixel History for the Advanced Camera for Surveys Wide Field Channel

摘要

A recent characterization of excess thermal electron leakage into in the the Hubble Space Telescope's (HST) Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) Wide Field Channel (WFC) has yielded interesting results about the stability of individual pixels throughout the detector (Borncamp et al. 2017). To perform this characterization of a large dataset in an efficient way, a new method to structure the data was conceived which led to a better process to write analysis algorithms. Here we present the method the data is structured that allowed us to efficiently store, read in, and analyze the data by creating what we call a 'Master Column Image' that allowed us to create efficient algorithms that utilize this structure which characterizes 16 years of observations of 16 million pixels in a matter of hours with a modest amount of processing power.