The Hubble Space Telescope Treasury Program on the Orion Nebula Cluster

Abstract

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Treasury Program on the Orion Nebula Cluster (ONC) has used 104 orbits of HST time to image the Great Orion Nebula region with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), the Wide-Field/Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), and the Near-Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrograph (NICMOS) instrument in 11 filters ranging from the U band to the H band equivalent of HST. The program has been intended to perform the definitive study of the stellar component of the ONC at visible wavelengths, addressing key questions like the cluster initial mass function, age spread, mass accretion, binarity, and cirumstellar disk evolution. The scanning pattern allowed us to cover a contiguous field of approximately 600 arcmin^2 with both ACS and WFPC2, with a typical exposure time of approximately 11 minutes per ACS filter, corresponding to a point source depth AB(F435W) = 25.8 and AB(F775W) = 25.2 with 0.2 mag of photometric error. We describe the observations, data reduction, and data products, including images, source catalogs, and tools for quick look preview. In particular, we provide ACS photometry for 3399 stars, most of them detected at multiple epochs; WFPC2 photometry for 1643 stars, 1021 of them detected in the U band; and NICMOS JH photometry for 2116 stars. We summarize the early science results that have been presented in a number of papers. The final set of images and the photometric catalogs are publicly available through the archive as High Level Science Products at the STScI Multimission Archive hosted by the Space Telescope Science Institute.

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