The primary task of the 1.26-m telescope jointly operated by the National Astronomical Observatory and Guangzhou University is photometric observations of the g, r, and i bands. A data processing pipeline system was set up with mature software packages, such as IRAF, SExtractor, and SCAMP, to process approximately 5 GB of observational data automatically every day. However, the success ratio was significantly reduced when processing blurred images owing to telescope tracking error; this, in turn, significantly constrained the output of the telescope. We propose a robust automated photometric pipeline (RAPP) software that can correctly process blurred images. Two key techniques are presented in detail: blurred star enhancement and robust image matching. A series of tests proved that RAPP not only achieves a photometric success ratio and precision comparable to those of IRAF but also significantly reduces the data processing load and improves the efficiency.
Light curves for RR Lyrae stars can be difficult to obtain properly in the K2 mission due to the similarities between the timescales of the observed physical phenomena and the instrumental signals appearing in the data. We developed a new photometric method called Extended Aperture Photometry (EAP), a key element of which is to extend the aperture to an optimal size to compensate for the motion of the telescope and to collect all available flux from the star before applying further corrections. We determined the extended apertures for individual stars by hand so far. Now we managed to automate…
We present some results of testing of commercial color CMOS cameras for astronomical applications. CMOS sensors allow to perform photometry in three filters simultaneously that gives a great advantage compared with monochrome CCD detectors. The Bayer BGR colour system realized in CMOS sensors is close to the Johnson BVR system. We demonstrate transformation from the Bayer color system to the Johnson one. Our photometric measurements with color CMOS cameras coupled to small telescopes (11 - 30 inch) reveal that in video mode stars up to V $\sim$ 9 can be shot at 24 frames per second. Using a hi…
A preliminary data analysis of the stellar light curves obtained by the robotic telescopes of the TAOS project is presented. We selected a data run relative to one of the stellar fields observed by three of the four TAOS telescopes, and we investigate the common trend and the correlation between the light curves. We propose two ways to remove these trends and show the preliminary results. A project aimed at flagging interesting behaviors, such as stellar variability, and to set up an automated follow-up with the San Pedro Mártir Facilities is on the way.
PHOTOMETRYPIPELINE (PP) is an automated pipeline that produces calibrated photometry from imaging data through image registration, aperture photometry, photometric calibration, and target identification with only minimal human interaction. PP utilizes the widely used Source Extractor software for source identification and aperture photometry; SCAMP is used for image registration. Both image registration and photometric calibration are based on matching field stars with star catalogs, requiring catalog coverage of the respective field. A number of different astrometric and photometric catalogs …
Proper photometric data are challenging to obtain in the K2 mission of the Kepler space telescope due to strong systematics caused by the two-wheel-mode operation. It is especially true for variable stars wherein physical phenomena occur on timescales similar to the instrumental signals. We originally developed a method with the aim to extend the photometric aperture to be able to compensate the motion of the telescope which we named Extended Aperture Photometry (EAP). Here we present the outline of the automatized version of the EAP method, an open-source pipeline called autoEAP. We compare t…
Ample evidence exists regarding supernovae being a major contributor to interstellar dust. In this work, the deepest far-infrared observations of the Crab Nebula are used to revisit the estimation of} the dust mass present in this supernova remnant. Images in filters between 70 and 500 $μ$m taken by the PACS and SPIRE instruments on-board of the Herschel Space Observatory are used. With an automated approach we constructed the spectral energy distribution of the Crab nebula to recover the dust mass. This approach makes use of several image processing techniques (thresholding, morphological pro…
I developed a new pure-python pipeline to reduce photometric and polarimetric data: ASTROPOP. It has been designed and optimized to work fully automated with the IAGPOL polarimeter of Pico dos Dias observatory (OPD, Brazil) and can reduce photometry and polarimetry data from other instruments, especially from SPARC4, a multi-channel polarimeter that has been developed for OPD. We present the results produced by this new code, and compare them with those obtained from PCCDPACK, a traditionally used IRAF package developed for IAGPOL. We also propose to use this code for automatic photometric red…
The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE; Wright et al. 2010) satellite observed the full sky in four mid-infrared bands in the 2.8 to 28 micron range. The primary mission was completed in 2010. The WISE team have done a superb job of producing a series of high-quality, well-documented, complete Data Releases in a timely manner. However, the "Atlas Image" coadds that are part of the recent AllWISE and previous data releases were intentionally blurred. Convolving the images by the point-spread function while coadding results in "matched-filtered" images that are close to optimal for detect…
FRA -- A new Fast, Robust and Automated pipeline for the detection and measurement of solar-like oscillations in time-series photometry of red-giant stars
The Gaia mission will have a profound impact on our understanding of the structure and dynamics of the Milky Way. Gaia is providing an exhaustive census of stellar parallaxes, proper motions, positions, colors and radial velocities, but also leaves some flaring holes in an otherwise complete data set. The radial velocities measured with the on-board high-resolution spectrograph will only reach some 10% of the full sample of stars with astrometry and photometry from the mission, and detailed chemical information will be obtained for less than 1%. Teams all over the world are organizing large-sc…
We demonstrate ground-based submillimagnitude (<10^-3) photometry of widely separated bright stars using snapshot CCD imaging. We routinely achieved this photometric precision by (1) choosing nearby comparison stars of a similar magnitude and spectral type, (2) defocusing the telescope to allow high signal (>10^7 electrons) to be acquired in a single integration, (3) pointing the telescope so that all stellar images fall on the same detector pixels, and (4) using a region of the CCD detector that is free of nonlinear or aberrant pixels. We describe semiautomated observations with the Supernova…
The Transient Optical Sky Survey (TOSS) is an automated, ground-based telescope system dedicated to searching for optical transient events. Small telescope tubes are mounted on a tracking, semi-equatorial frame with a single polar axis. Each fixed declination telescope records successive exposures which overlap in right ascension. Nightly observations produce time-series images of fixed fields within each declination band. We describe the TOSS data pipeline, including automated routines used for image calibration, object detection and identification, astrometry, and differential photometry. Ti…
Small aperture telescopes provide the opportunity to conduct high frequency, targeted observations of near-Earth Asteroids that are not feasible with larger facilities due to highly competitive time allocation requirements. Observations of asteroids with these types of facilities often focus on rotational brightness variations rather than longer-term phase angle dependent variations (phase curves) due to the difficulty of achieving high precision photometric calibration. We have developed an automated asteroid light curve extraction and calibration pipeline for images of moving objects from th…
VST--Tube is a new software package designed to process optical astronomical images. It is an automated pipeline to go from the raw exposures to fully calibrated co-added images, and to extract catalogs with aperture and PSF photometry. A set of tools allow the data administration and the quality check of the intermediate and final products. VST-Tube comes with a Graphical User Interface to facilitate the interaction between data and user. We outline here the VST--Tube architecture and show some applications enlightening some of the characteristics of the pipeline.
The K2 mission is a repurposed use of the Kepler spacecraft to perform high-precision photometry of selected fields in the ecliptic. We have developed an aperture photometry pipeline for K2 data which performs dynamic automated aperture mask selection, background estimation and subtraction, and positional decorrelation to minimize the effects of spacecraft pointing jitter. We also identify secondary targets in the K2 "postage stamps" and produce light curves for those targets as well. Pipeline results will be made available to the community. Here we describe our pipeline and the photometric pr…
The All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) is working towards imaging the entire visible sky every night to a depth of V~17 mag. The present data covers the sky and spans ~2-5~years with ~100-400 epochs of observation. The data should contain some ~1 million variable sources, and the ultimate goal is to have a database of these observations publicly accessible. We describe here a first step, a simple but unprecedented web interface https://asas-sn.osu.edu/ that provides an up to date aperture photometry light curve for any user-selected sky coordinate. Because the light curves are p…
We present an automated non-parametric light profile extraction pipeline called AutoProf. All steps for extracting surface brightness (SB) profiles are included in AutoProf, allowing streamlined analyses of galaxy images. AutoProf improves upon previous non-parametric ellipse fitting implementations with fit-stabilization procedures adapted from machine learning techniques. Additional advanced analysis methods are included in the flexible pipeline for the extraction of alternative brightness profiles (along radial or axial slices), smooth axisymmetric models, and the implementation of decision…
The DEEP-South photometric census of small Solar System bodies produces massive time-series data of variable, transient or moving objects as a by-product. To fully investigate unexplored variable phenomena, we present an application of multi-aperture photometry and FastBit indexing techniques for faster access to a portion of the DEEP-South year-one data. Our new pipeline is designed to perform automated point source detection, robust high-precision photometry and calibration of non-crowded fields which have overlap with previously surveyed areas. In this paper, we show some examples of catalo…
SPECULOOS-South, an observatory composed of four independent 1m robotic telescopes, located at ESO Paranal, Chile, started scientific operation in January 2019. This Southern Hemisphere facility operates as part of SPECULOOS, an international network of 1m-class telescopes surveying for transiting terrestrial planets around the nearest and brightest ultra-cool dwarfs. To automatically and efficiently process the observations of SPECULOOS-South, and to deal with the specialised photometric requirements of ultra-cool dwarf targets, we present our automatic pipeline. This pipeline includes an alg…
Bayesian Component Separation for DESI LAE Automated Spectroscopic Redshifts and Photometric Targeting
Harvard University（哈佛大学）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；NSF NOIRLab（美国国家光学红外天文研究实验室）；Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory（劳伦斯伯克利国家实验室）；Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey（新泽西州立罗格斯大学）；Purdue University（普渡大学）；Boston University（波士顿大学）；Università degli Studi di Milano（米兰大学）；INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera（意大利国家天体物理研究所布雷拉天文台）
PhoPS: An automated photometric pipeline for survey-era astronomy
Türkiye National Observatories, TUG（土耳其国家天文台）；The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TÜBİTAK)（土耳其科学技术研究委员会）；Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC)（安达卢西亚天体物理研究所）；LIRA, CNRS UMR8254, Observatoire de Paris（巴黎天文台）
The efficient classification of different types of supernova is one of the most important problems for observational cosmology. However, spectroscopic confirmation of most objects in upcoming photometric surveys, such as the The Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), will be unfeasible. The development of automated classification processes based on photometry has thus become crucial. In this paper we investigate the performance of machine learning (ML) classification on the final cosmological constraints using simulated lightcurves from The Supernova Photometric Classificati…
The ESA Gaia mission provides a unique time-domain survey for more than one billion sources brighter than G=20.7 mag. Gaia offers the unprecedented opportunity to study variability phenomena in the Universe thanks to multi-epoch G-magnitude photometry in addition to astrometry, blue and red spectro-photometry, and spectroscopy. Within the Gaia Consortium, Coordination Unit 7 has the responsibility to detect variable objects, classify them, derive characteristic parameters for specific variability classes, and provide global descriptions of variable phenomena. We describe the variability proces…
The NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is observing tens of millions of stars with time spans ranging from $\sim$ 27 days to about 1 year of continuous observations. This vast amount of data contains a wealth of information for variability, exoplanet, and stellar astrophysics studies but requires a number of processing steps before it can be fully utilized. In order to efficiently process all the TESS data and make it available to the wider scientific community, the TESS Data for Asteroseismology working group, as part of the TESS Asteroseismic Science Consortium, has created an…
The next generation of spectroscopic surveys is expected to provide spectra for hundreds of thousands of white dwarf (WD) candidates in the upcoming years. Currently, spectroscopic classification of white dwarfs is mostly done by visual inspection, requiring substantial amounts of expert attention. We propose a data-driven pipeline for fast, automatic selection and spectroscopic classification of WD candidates, trained using spectroscopically confirmed objects with available Gaia astrometry, photometry, and Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) spectra with signal-to-noise ratios $\geq9$. The pipeli…
University of Arkansas（阿肯色大学）；Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory（劳伦斯伯克利国家实验室）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Sky surveys are the largest data generators in astronomy, making automated tools for extracting meaningful scientific information an absolute necessity. We show that, without the need for labels, self-supervised learning recovers representations of sky survey images that are semantically useful for a variety of scientific tasks. These representations can be directly used as features, or fine-tuned, to outperform supervised methods trained only on labeled data. We apply a contrastive learning framework on multi-band galaxy photometry from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to learn image repre…
ImageJ is a graphical user interface (GUI) driven, public domain, Java-based, software package for general image processing traditionally used mainly in life sciences fields. The image processing capabilities of ImageJ are useful and extendable to other scientific fields. Here we present AstroImageJ (AIJ), which provides an astronomy specific image display environment and tools for astronomy specific image calibration and data reduction. Although AIJ maintains the general purpose image processing capabilities of ImageJ, AIJ is streamlined for time-series differential photometry, light curve de…
ImageJ is a graphical user interface (GUI) driven, public domain, Java-based, software package for general image processing traditionally used mainly in life sciences fields. The image processing capabilities of ImageJ are useful and extendable to other scientific fields. Here we present AstroImageJ (AIJ), which provides an astronomy specific image display environment and tools for astronomy specific image calibration and data reduction. Although AIJ maintains the general purpose image processing capabilities of ImageJ, AIJ is streamlined for time-series differential photometry, light curve de…
