Updates of the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph onboard the Hubble Space Telescope

The Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) onboard the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) continues to produce high quality scientific results using a diverse set of imaging and spectroscopy modes, filters, and gratings from the far UV into the near IR, providing a unique resource to the astronomical community. We present an overview of recent updates across a variety of instrument use cases such as a new monitor to track cosmic-ray flagging in CCD spectra in response to occasional over-flagging from the default calstis cosmic-ray rejection. Additionally, we present new Jupyter Notebooks to provide STIS users with tutorials on customizing CCD dark reference files for calibration, verifying target acquisition performance, and using the cross-correlation method to fix wavelength zero point shifts due to some target acquisition failures. We also report on recent STIS monitoring trends, including the instrument’s focus, blind pointing accuracy, dark rates, CCD read noise, and CCD charge transfer inefficiency (CTI). The STIS exposure time calculator (ETC) is updated with detector parameters extrapolated from these monitors to mid-cycle 31. Furthermore, the FUV-MAMA glow region scaling values in the ETC were redefined to correspond to more typical use cases. We also present a brief introduction to an alpha release of the new Pandeia-based ETC, which currently supports STIS imaging modes, FUV first-order spectroscopy, and NUV-MAMA echelle spectroscopy.