%0 Journal Article
%T Cosmic shear from STIS Pure Parallels: I Data
%A N. Pirzkal
%A L. Collodel
%A T. Erben
%A R. A. E. Fosbury
%A W. Freudling
%A H. Haemmerle
%A B. Jain
%A A. Micol
%A J. -M. Miralles
%A P. Schneider
%A S. Seitz
%A S. D. M. White
%J Physics
%D 2001
%I arXiv
%R 10.1051/0004-6361:20010836
%X Following the second HST servicing mission in 1997 when the STIS instrument was installed and the capability for parallel observations was enhanced, a substantial archive of non-proprietary parallel data has been accumulating. In this paper, we discuss the use of unfiltered STIS imaging data for a project that requires deep observations along as many independent lines-of-sight as possible. We have developed a technique to determine which datasets in the archive can safely be co-added together and have developed an iterative co-addition technique which enabled us to produce 498 high-quality, deep images. The principal motivation for this work is to measure the Cosmic Shear on small angular scales and a value derived from these data will be presented in a subsequent paper. A valuable by-product of this work is a set of high quality combined fields which can be used for other projects. The data are publicly available at http://www.stecf.org/projects/shear/
%U http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0102330v3