Much of the documentation for STSDAS tasks resides in various cookbooks and handbooks. A good introduction to using IRAF and STSDAS to analyze HST data is the HST Data Handbook , especially the Introduction. The full list of instrument data handbooks contains references to the latest versions of each instrument's data handbooks. More specialized information can be found in the data handbooks of the individual instruments:
- COS:Cosmic Origins Spectrograph(Cos)
- WFC3:Cosmic Origins Spectrograph(Wfc)
- ACS:Cosmic Origins Spectrograph(Acs)
- FGS:Cosmic Origins Spectrograph(Fgs)
- NICMOS:Cosmic Origins Spectrograph(Nic)
- STIS:Cosmic Origins Spectrograph(Stis)
- WFPC2:Cosmic Origins Spectrograph
Other resources include:
- Installation Instructions are available on the Download page.
- The STSDAS Site Manager's Installation Guide and Reference is now mostly OBSOLETE. See installation instructions on the Download page. Chapter 5 and Appendix A are still relevant.
- The STScI User's Guide to the FITS kernel provides a read online guide.
- The NOAO FITS userguide provides a dowloadable PostScript file.
- The Dither Handbook. This provides a cookbook-style manual for analyzing dithered HST data.
- The Synphot Users Guide. This gives a guide to using Synphot, a package that simulates photometric and spectroscopic data, allowing users to predict count rates, exposure times and signal-to-noise ratios. The instructions for the CDBS data files are obsolete; see here for the latest on CDBS.
- The SYNPHOT Data User's Guide. User's Guide for the data-driven aspects of Synphot, describes obsmodes and keywords for HST instruments and supported groundbased photometric systems.
- STSDAS Programmer's Documentation, a collection of manuals for programmers.
- The IRAF doc page.
- The IGI Manual. IGI (Interactive Graphics Interpreter) is an STSDAS task for drawing high quality data plots.