Imaging With STIS: Astronomy at V = 30

Abstract

In February, 1997, the second Space Shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Observatory will install the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS). This new instrument will greatly enhance the spectroscopic capabilities of the Hubble Space Telescope by providing a longslit format and CCD detector technology. STIS can also be used as an imager, providing an alternative to the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. The filter set of STIS is limited and does not contain standard bandpasses, but we show here that this does not preclude useful broad band photometry. In fact, the STIS photometric system may be preferable to that of WFPC2 for certain applications where a faint limiting magnitude and fine spatial resolution are overriding considerations. The two optical wide-band choices on STIS are a clear aperture and a longpass ($λ> 5500$Å) filter. We define an effective shortpass filter from the difference of these, making two-color photometry possible with STIS. We present preliminary transformations between the STIS system and Cousins BVRI bandpasses, showing that these transformations are very well-behaved over almost all temperatures, luminosities, and abundances for normal stars. In an 8-orbit cycle, STIS will be able to reach signal-to-noise of $\sim 5-10$ at V = 30.0 in its clear and longpass imaging modes, a significant increase in the power of HST to address a number of fundamental issues out of reach of current instrumentation capabilities on the ground or in space.