Description

Class

jwst.assign_mtwcs.AssignMTWcsStep

Alias

assign_mtwcs

The jwst.assign_mtwcs step modifies the WCS output frame in each exposure of a Moving Target (MT) observation association, such that the WCS is centered at the average location of the target within the whole association. This results in proper alignment of multiple exposures, which takes place downstream in the calibration pipeline, in the target frame, rather than the background sky frame.

A moving target will naturally be located at different sky coordinates (RA, Dec) across multiple exposures within an MT observation. When multiple images or spectra get combined during Stage 3 processing, the relative alignment of the images/spectra is based on the sky coordinates of each exposure. In the case of moving targets, where the RA/Dec of the target is changing between exposures, the normal alignment process would result in the target being at different image coordinates and hence coming out either smeared (for slowly moving targets) or at multiple locations within the combined data. This step modifies the WCS of each exposure to recenter it at a common RA/Dec for the target, so that subsequent image alignment and combination has the target properly aligned.

The step is executed at the beginning of the calwebb_image3 and calwebb_spec3 pipelines, so that all subsequent steps that rely on WCS information use the frame centered on the target.

This step depends on keywords that are unique to MT exposures, as shown in the following table.

FITS Keyword	Data model attribute	Type (Value)	Description
TARGTYPE	meta.target.type	string (moving)	Type of target
MT_RA MT_DEC	meta.wcsinfo.mt_ra meta.wcsinfo.mt_dec	number number	Target RA and Dec at mid-point of exposure [deg]
MT_AVRA MT_AVDEC	meta.wcsinfo.mt_avra meta.wcsinfo.mt_avdec	number number	Target RA and Dec averaged between exposures [deg]

A “TARGTYPE” value of “moving” is used to identify exposures as containing a moving target. The keywords “MT_RA” and “MT_DEC” are populated in the uncalibrated (uncal) product for each exposure and give the position of the target at the mid-point of each exposure. The assign_mtwcs step computes the average of the “MT_RA” and “MT_DEC” values across all expsoures in an association and stores the result in the “MT_AVRA” and “MT_AVDEC” keywords of each exposure.

In addition to populating the “MT_AVRA” and “MT_AVDEC” keywords, this step adds another transform to the original WCS in each exposure that results in the WCS frame being centered at “MT_AVRA” and “MT_AVDEC”. The transform of the original WCS associated with the science aperture pointing (i.e. without the additional MT correction) can be accessed by executing:

sci_transform = model.meta.wcs.get_transform('detector', 'world')