HSTaXe is a Python package to provide a uniform process to perform spectral extraction for the Hubble Space Telescope. HSTaXe supports all slitless spectroscopy modes provided by the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS).

The core hstaxe is written in ANSI C and is highly cross-platform by leveraging CFITSIO, GSL, and WCSLIB, which have been successfully employed under Linux, Solaris, and MacOS X.

HSTaXe is the successor to aXe, a similar package written on PyRAF/IRAF.

To install the latest release of hstaxe, we recommend the following steps::

conda create --name hstaxe-env "python>=3.8, <3.11"
conda activate hstaxe-env
conda install gsl cfitsio make automake autoconf libtool pkg-config -y
conda install wcstools -c https://conda.anaconda.org/conda-forge/ --override-channels -y
pip install hstaxe --no-cache-dir

For additional installation instructions, including instructions on installing older or development versions of hstaxe, visit our full documentation: https://hstaxe.readthedocs.io/en/latest/hstaxe/installing.html

Example notebooks can also be found on our full documentation: https://hstaxe.readthedocs.io/en/latest/hstaxe/examples.html

To run the notebooks, you will need to install jupyter::

pip install jupyter