SPIRE photometer High Resolution Maps

Standard Pipeline Generation products (bottom) and corresponding HiRes maps (top) for M31 in the three SPIRE photometer bands

The HiRes maps are produced with a deconvolution method based on the Richardson-Lucy algorithm (Richardson 1972, Lucy 1974) applied on standard pipeline processed extended-source calibrated maps. The good knowledge of the SPIRE Photometer beam allows for this iterative "image restoration" and as a result the maps have a factor of two better resolution (Xu et al. 2014). The HiRes maps are best suited to studies of extended structures with high signal-to-noise.

Only a subset of maps were selected for HiRes processing, with the primary consideration the signal above the extragalactic background. The exhaustive criteria for selecting maps for HiRes processing are presented in the SPIRE Handbook, section 5.11. The final number of observations that have HiRes maps is 800. When available, the HiRes maps are part of the observation context. Thus the HiRes maps in this HPDP are exact copy of those present in the observational context of each observation and for convenience we provide them as HPDP.

The list of the OBSIDs that have HiRes maps is provided here and the individual maps can be accessed through the Herschel Science Archive, in the HPDP panel. They are also present in the full observation context or in the level-2/level2-5 contexts downloaded from the archive.