The NICMOS Polarimetric Calibration

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

Recently, it has been shown that NICMOS possesses an instrumental polarization at a level of 1.2%. This completely inhibits the data reduction in a number of previous GO programs, and hampers the ability of the instrument to perform high accuracy polarimetry. In all, 90 orbits of HST data are affected, with potentially many more in Cycle 15. We propose to obtain high signal to noise observations of three polarimetric standards at the cardinal roll angles of the NICMOS polarizers for both NIC1 and NIC2. These observations are designed to fully characterize the instrumental polarization in order for NICMOS to reach its full potential by enabling high accuracy polarimetry of sources with polarizations around 1%. The residual polarization will also be determined as a function of position and spectral energy distribution. Our group will rapidly turn around the required data products and produce reports and software for the accurate representation of the instrumental polarization. These items will be presented to STScI and for dissemination among the wider astronomical community.

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