As a service to the astronomical community, we are recalibrating all archival Hubble Space Telescope Faint Object Spectrograph UV and optical spectrophotometry of active galaxies and quasars in order to extract uniformly calibrated spectrophotometric data for further detailed scientific investigations. The raw archival spectra are recalibrated using the latest algorithms and calibration data. Spectral data contaminated by intermittent noisy diodes and cosmic ray events are identified manually and eliminated. Wherever possible we combine multiple observations of the same source to produce a single spectrum per object with the highest possible signal-to-noise ratio and covering the widest wavelength range, scaling the individual datasets to the same photometric scale where necessary. Detailed quality assurance is performed to ensure that the merged object spectra are of the highest quality consistent with the limitations of the individual datasets and calibrations.

At this time, we have completed recalibration of all non-polarimetric, pre-COSTAR data, and are making the merged object spectra available electronically. A paper describing the pre-COSTAR dataset was published in the January 1, 2004 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, and is also available as a preprint in PDF format.

The complete dataset is available here as a gzip'ped tarball. For access to individual datasets, see the table below.