The first release of data from the Herschel ATLAS: the SPIRE images

Understand

We have reduced the data taken with the Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver (SPIRE) photometer on board the Herschel Space Observatory in the Science Demonstration Phase (SDP) of the Herschel Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area Survey (H-ATLAS).

• We describe the data reduction, which poses specific challenges, both because of the sheer size of the data, and because only two scans are made for each region.
• We implement effective solutions to process the bolometric timelines into maps, and show that correlations among detectors are negligible, and that the photometer is stable on time scales up to 250 s.
• This is longer than the time the telescope takes to cross the observed sky region, and it allows us to use naive binning methods for an optimal reconstruction of the sky emission.