A. Micol, R. Albrecht
ST-ECF, ESA/SSD/SA, ESO
B. Pirenne
ST-ECF, ESO
Among the tasks of the Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility
(ST-ECF) is to provide software for the retrieval, calibration and
analysis of HST data to the astronomical community. This has
notoriously been plagued by problems of
programming language incompatibility, platform incompatibility,
installation problems, on line help/documentation and user interface
inconsitencies, and remote maitenance issues.
The combination of Java and state-of-the-art network browsers
have the potential to solve many of these problems.
In addition it eliminates potentially paralyzing
throughput problems by pushing the processing load to the client machine.
This is important for post-retrieval re-calibration of multiple data sets.
First experiments were conducted in the area of NICMOS support tools,
and for the preview of data from the HST archive. Examples will be shown
and experiences will be discussed.