A Cool-Star UV Spectral Catalog ("COOLCAT")

COOLCAT is a catalog of HST STIS Echelle spectra of normal, late-type (cool) stars. The catalog includes those objects in the HST archive as of March 2003 with publicly available STIS data taken in one or more of the Echelle modes. Unusual objects like cataclysmic variables, symbiotics, and eclipsing binaries of the Zeta Aurigae class were excluded. For each Echelle observation, the individual orders from the standard pipeline processing were spliced together to form a continuous 1-D spectrum. Each spectrum was graded on a scale of A (=excellent) to E (=probably useless for analysis) by considering the cumulative distribution of signal-to-noise over the wavelength bins. If more than one observation was available in a specific Echelle mode setting, these were coadded using cross-correlation to align the exposures to a common wavelength scale. If two or more different mode settings were available, the segments were concatenated to form a broad-band spectral tracing. The flux scales of the segments were adjusted, if necessary, to match calibrated IUE NEWSIPS low- and high-resolution spectral energy distributions (as available).