University of Washington
Astronomy Department

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Instructions for STScI Archive Downloads

If you don't need instructions for downloading from the STScI archives, then go straight to the HST Archives and start preparing your downloads.
Be sure to erase all of your files from the anonymous FTP area as soon as you can!

The instructions below are mandatory for proprietary data and optional (and optimal) for public data. Go to the HST Archives and select the data that you wish to download following their instructions. Eventually a page called "Retrieval Options" appears. Assume that your UW username is UWuser.

Fill in the

  Archive Username:    Einstein
  Archive Password:    (whatever) - free from STScI on request (note 1)
          Hostname:    ftp.astro.washington.edu
         Directory:    incoming/UWuser/... (note 2)
          Username:    anonymous or blank
          Password:    UWuser@astro.washington.edu or blank

and then select or default the archive classes, file extensions as you require. Click "Send retrieval request to ST-DADS". A new screen appears confirming that your archive username and password are valid. A few mnutes later you'll get an email showing you the name of your request and instructions for how you can track its progress. You'll get a second email with final status information later after the transfer is finished.

Suppose that you wish to inspect the files or to retireive them after the download ends. See and copy or move the data this way:

cd /host/www/net/www/incoming/UWuser/...
ls 
cp (filename) (path to another computer)/newfilename or "." (note 3)

Note 1: Register for an archive password at https://archive.stsci.edu/registration.html. Be sure to remember it.

Note 2: we generally forbid FTP acess EXCEPT into our anonymous ftp account. When you log into this account you are secretly located at /host/www/net/ftp/. You must then specify a path to the directory where you wish your files to be written. You MUST select the directory incoming/yourusername with optional directories following. Before you start the download, make sure that you have a directory called /host/www/net/ftp/incoming/yourusername! If not, create one with write privileges.

Note 3: If you're downloading WFPC2 data suing the on-the-fly calibration, then you'll end up with lots of generally (though not always) extraneous files. In many cases the only file you need is the _c0f.fits or _c0h.fits file containingthe image as a GEIS stack (read it into a more usable form using IRAF/STSDAS/FITSIO/STRFITS). Some of the files with other extensions are needed for fancy dithers and drizzles.

Note 4: With On-The-Fly-Reprocessing (OTFR), many of the requested data files will be delivered to the ftp site multiple times. You may want to download data for several objects A,B,C... and you may wish to put the archival data into separate directories with the same (or similar) names. In this case

  cd /host/www/net/ftp/incoming/yourusername
  mkdir A
  mkdir B
  mkdir C (etc.)

Now go to the HST Archives for your downloads. Be sure to erase all of your files from the anonymous FTP area as soon as you can!

If you are receiving more data than the ftp disk can hold, this handy python scipt, which you can set to run periodically with cron, might help. Everytime it is run, it looks at the ftp directory of your choice. If there are 2 or more files in that directory, it moves all but the newest file to a new directory. To use it, just modify the lines that start with 'ftp_dir' and 'new_dir'. Then set up a cron job to run the program however often you think appropriate. You will have to move the last file from the ftp directory to the new directory yourself.