We will end maintenance of HSTaXe on 3/15/2026. We currently do not accept new feature requests or application upgrades, and are only supporting major bug fixes until 3/15/2026. After that date the software will remain available in perpetuity, but we will no longer provide user support, bug fixes, feature requests or system upgrades. Please migrate to using Slitlessutils (see https://github.com/spacetelescope/slitlessutils and https://slitlessutils.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) for your work, and please give us feedback on the new tool and how we can best support your transition to using Slitlessutils.
A stable, working version of HSTaXe is available as a Docker image at
https://stsci.box.com/shared/static/6a75go3d0yqc627bts2yuqk0veancylh.tar. To load this image into
your local Docker instance, use the command docker load --input hstaxe_docker_image.tar. Note
that the image is only available as a Linux x86_64 platform, so you may experience poorer
performance if running the image on a machine with a different architecture (e.g. a Mac with
ARM64 architecture).
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