H-ATLAS: PACS imaging for the Science Demonstration Phase

Understand

We describe the reduction of data taken with the PACS instrument on board the Herschel Space Observatory in the Science Demonstration Phase of the Herschel-ATLAS (H-ATLAS) survey, specifically data obtained for a 4x4-deg^2 region using Herschel's fast-scan (60 arcsec/s) parallel mode.

• We describe in detail a pipeline for data reduction using customised procedures within HIPE from data retrieval to the production of science-quality images.
• We found that the standard procedure for removing Cosmic-Ray glitches also removed parts of bright sources and so implemented an effective two-stage process to minimise these problems.
• The pronounced 1/f noise is removed from the timelines using 3.4- and 2.5-arcmin boxcar high-pass filters at 100 and 160-um.