Herschel Data Processing for Newcomers, 24-27 June 2013, ESAC, Madrid, Spain

 

General

Successfully launched together with Planck on 14 May 2009, Herschel recently reached the end of its operational lifetime on 29 April 2013, after the exhaustion of its supply of liquid helium coolant, completing almost 4 years of pioneering observations of the cool Universe. Indeed, Herschel has made over 35 000 scientific observations, amassing more than 25 000 hours' worth of science data from about 600 observing programmes, most of which is already publicly available from the Herschel Science Archive. Although Herschel observing is now finished, the data collected by this wonderful mission will enable a vast amount of exciting science to be done for many years to come. We expect that it will provide even more discoveries that have been made during the lifetime of the Herschel mission. Our task is now to make the treasure trove of Herschel data as valuable as possible.

Objectives

This workshop, organised by the Herschel Science Centre, in collaboration with the Instrument Control Centres and the NASA Herschel Science Centre, is targeted at an audience of novice users interested in accessing and interpreting Herschel data for the first time, with little or no previous experience in the analysis of Herschel observations using HIPE (Herschel Interactive Processing Environment). We invite preferentially Ph.D. students and young post-docs who have recently started working on projects based on the analysis of Herschel observations, but we also accept more advanced users who may want to get a deeper knowledge of certain aspects of the interactive processing of Herschel data with which they may not be sufficiently familiar.

The workshop, which can be attended on-line or in person, will consist of a mixture of tutorials in the format of presentations that will be broadcast live to on-line participants, and hands-on sessions customised for those participants attending the workshop in person. The tutorials, that will take place mainly in the morning session of every day, will include overview talks about general issues like the contents of the Herschel Science Archive, how to access and inspect Herschel products, ways to assess the quality of Herschel data, and the basics of the data reduction with the Herschel Interactive Processing Environment (HIPE). These overview talks will be complemented by demonstrations addressing a wide variety of instrument-specific data reduction and calibration topics, covering the most frequent aspects that need to be considered when analysing Herschel data. The hands-on sessions will be organised in the afternoons for those participants attending the workshop in-person at ESAC to give them the opportunity to work on their own data or on public archival data with the personalised support of instrument experts. The first day of the workshop will be devoted to more general issues, while the rest of the days in the week will be oriented to address instrument-specific aspects of Herschel data processing. All presentations will be recorded and posted on the web after the end of the workshop.

Workshop Information

Workshop Presentations