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Davis, L. E. 2001, in ASP Conf. Ser., Vol. 238, Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems X, eds. F. R. Harnden, Jr., F. A. Primini, & H. E. Payne (San Francisco: ASP), 511

Automated Photometric Calibration Software For IRAF

Lindsey E. Davis
National Optical Astronomy Observatories, Tucson, AZ 85719

Abstract:

New IRAF tools for the photometric calibration of optical/IR images are presented. The new tools are standard star catalog and world coordinate driven, requiring both accurate standard star catalog coordinate and accurate image coordinate data. Network access to standard star catalog servers is supported. The new tools are suitable for embedded use in pipeline reduction software.

1. Introduction

The new tools described here were written to support the photometric calibration of NOAO Deep Wide Survey data and are sufficiently general that, with minor modifications, they can be used with any standard star catalog server and applied to any optical/IR image data.

Sections 2 and 3 describe the current standard star catalog and image data requirements. Sections 4 and 5 provide an overview of the software and a summary of its principle features. The current status of and future plans for the software are summarized in section 6.

2. The Standard Star Catalog Requirements

The standard star catalogs must satisfy the following requirements.

3. The Image Data Requirements

The input image data must satisfy the following requirements.

4. Scientific Functionality

Given a standard star catalog and an input image list which satisfy the criteria defined in sections 2 and 3, the photometric calibration software performs the following functions. An outline of the calibration software is shown in Table 1.


Table: The Photometric Calibration Package
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular*}{\textwidth} {r@{\extracolsep{\fill}}c@{}l}
\hline...
...the 4m mosaic aperture photometry parameters\\
\hline
\end{tabular*}\end{table}


5. Software Features

The photometric calibration software supports the following features.

6. Current Status and Future Plans

The current photometric calibration software uses a set of catalog access tasks and catalog access API developed for use with astrometric catalogs but not yet part of the standard IRAF distribution (Davis 2000). The code which does the actual aperture photometry, matches the observations, and computes the photometric transformations is an adaptation of the existing IRAF APPHOT and PHOTCAL packages (Davis and Gigoux 1993).

Although most of the software is automated and runs without intervention by the user, some user input is still required in the areas of grouping the standard star images and interacting with the fitting process to get an optimal fit. More work is required in these areas in order to make the code fully automated in a pipeline environment.

The author would like to thank Daniel Durand for help in the early stages of developing the catalog interface, the NOAO Deep Wide Survey team for providing motivation for the project.

References

Davis, L. E. 2000, in ASP Conf. Ser., Vol. 216, Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems IX, ed. N. Manset, C. Veillet, & D. Crabtree (San Francisco: ASP), 667

Davis, L. E. & Gigoux, P. 2000, in ASP Conf. Ser., Vol. 52, Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems II, ed. R. J. Hanisch, R. J. V. Brissenden, & J. Barnes (San Francisco: ASP), 479


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