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An Introduction to Astronomical Photometry Using Ccds An Introduction to Astronomical Photometry Using CCDs W. Romanishin University of Oklahoma [email protected] The lastest version of this book (in pdf format) can be downloaded from http://observatory.ou.edu This is version wrccd4a.pdf built on: March 31, 2002 2 Foreword/ Thanks / Production Details This book began as a set of lecture notes for a junior/senior course entitled \Observatory Meth- ods" that I teach each spring at the University of Oklahoma (OU). The book is intended as an introduction for the college astrophysics major to photometry in the optical region of the spectrum of astronomical objects using CCD imaging from groundbased telescopes. Of course, in these times of Giga-buck satellite telescopes of various sorts, groundbased optical astronomy is only a part of observational astronomy. Within groundbased optical astronomy, spectroscopy, only briefly men- tioned here, probably takes up as much or more telescope time as photometry. That said, it is still obvious that imaging photometry is an important part of observational astronomy. With the ready availablity of inexpensive CCDs and computer power, even a small telescope can provide an important \hand on" learning experience not available with remote satellite observatories. This book represents knowledge I have accumulated over 20 years of observing with a wide range of telescopes. My PhD disseration, finished in 1980, was probably one of the last observational dissertations to use photographic emulsions as the primary detector. Since then I have observed with various photomultiplier detectors and many different CCD systems, on telescopes ranging in aperture from 0.4 to 10 meters. I would like to thank the good people of the Great State of Oklahoma for paying my salary. I would like to thank the NSF ILI program (Award Number 9452009) and OU for funds that purchased OUs 16 inch telescope and CCD. I would like to thank all the anonymous computer types who have written the free software used to produce this document. This document was produced mostly using free software running under LINUX, with a little Windoze stuff used only when unavoidable. ASCII LaTeX source text was edited with EMACS, an editor which looks exactly the same on my LINUX box in my office or on my ancient Windoze notebook while eating yet another bag of peanuts on the Southwest flights to and from Arizona. My handrawn figures (and other figures swiped directly from other sources) were scanned with an HP 5200Cse scanner and saved as jpg images. The high resolution non- scanned plots were produced with IGI in STSDAS running under IRAF, saved as eps files. These eps files were converted to pdf files using epstopdf. The LaTeX files and jpg and pdf plots were converted into the final pdf document with pdflatex. Contents 1 Photometry: What and Why 9 2 Visible EMR 11 3 Imaging, Spectrophotometry and Photometry 13 4 The Magnitude and Color System 19 4.1 Magnitudes . 19 4.2 Bolometric Magnitudes . 20 4.3 Colors . 21 5 Telescopes 25 5.1 Job of the Telescope . 25 5.2 Image Formation . 25 5.3 Types of Telescopes . 27 5.4 Focal length and f-ratio . 29 5.5 Field of View and Sky Coverage . 31 5.6 Angular Resolution . 31 5.7 Telescope Mountings . 36 6 Large Telescopes: Expensive Toys for Good Boys and Girls 39 6.1 Observing Modes . 39 6.2 Access to Large Telescopes: Who gets to use the Big Toys . 40 6.3 Big Optical/IR Telescopes of the World . 41 3 4 CONTENTS 7 The Atmosphere: Bane of the Astronomer 45 7.1 Space Astronomy and the Perfect Observing Site . 46 7.2 Clouds and Photometric Skies . 47 7.3 Clouds: the Bad and the Ugly . 47 8 Seeing and Pixel Sizes 49 8.1 Seeing Limited Images . 50 9 Optical Depth and Atmospheric Extinction: \Theory" 53 9.1 χ and τ - Its all Greek to me! . 53 9.2 Atmospheric Extinction . 57 10 Night Sky, Bright Sky 61 11 Photometric Detectors 67 11.1 Human Eye . 67 11.2 Photographic Emulsions . 69 11.3 Modern Detectors - PMT and CCD . 69 12 CCDs (Charge Coupled Devices) 73 12.1 Basic Concepts . 73 12.2 Amateur vs. Professional CCDs . 79 12.3 Flat Field Frames . 79 13 Computer Image Processing 81 13.1 Image Format . 81 13.2 Image Format - FITS . 82 13.3 Basic Image Arithmetic and Combining . 82 13.4 Smoothing Images . 83 13.5 Image Flipping and Transposing . 83 13.6 Image Shifting and Rotating . 84 13.7 Image Subsections . 84 CONTENTS 5 13.8 Mosaicing . 84 14 IRAF and LINUX 85 14.1 Basic Structure of IRAF . 86 15 Image Display 89 15.1 Histogram . 89 15.2 Windowing . 90 16 An Overview of Doing Photometry 93 17 Measuring Instrumental Magnitudes 95 17.1 Point Spread Function (PSF) and Size of Star Images . 95 17.2 Aperture Correction . 96 17.3 phot . 100 17.4 Crowded Field Photometry . 101 18 Atmospheric Extinction in Practice 103 18.1 Airmass . 103 18.2 Determining K . 104 18.3 Complication: 2nd Order B Band extinction . 105 18.4 Extinction Variations . 106 19 Color and Magnitude Transformation Equations 113 20 Uncertainties and Signal to Noise Ratio 119 20.1 One little photon, two little photons, three... 119 20.2 Application to Real Astronomical Measurement . 122 20.3 Combining Observations . 126 20.4 How Faint Can We Go? . 127 21 How Many Counts? Limiting Magnitude? 129 21.1 How Many Counts? . 129 6 CONTENTS 21.2 Calculating Limiting Magnitude . 130 22 Filters 131 23 Standard Stars for Photometry 135 24 Common (and Un-Common) Photometry Goofups 139 24.1 Things that Get in the Way of Photons . 139 24.2 Telescope Problems- Optical and Mechanical . 141 24.3 CCD and Camera Problems . 141 24.4 Observing Technique Problems . 142 25 RA and DEC and Angles on the Sky 143 25.1 Angles on the sky . 144 26 Whats Up , Doc? 147 26.1 Sky Calendar . 147 26.2 Planning Photometry . 149 26.3 Moon . 149 26.4 Finding Charts . 152 27 Projects 153 27.1 Basic CCD Reduction . 153 27.2 Scale of CCD . 153 27.3 Extinction . 154 27.4 Color Equations . 154 27.5 Variable Stars . 154 27.6 Star Cluster Color Magnitude Diagrams . 154 27.7 Emission line images of HII regions . 155 27.8 Stellar Parallax and proper motion . 155 27.9 Astrometry of Asteroids . 155 27.10Asteroid Parallax . 155 CONTENTS 7 A Measuring Angles, Angular Area, and the SAA 157 A.1 Angular Area . 158 A.2 Trig Functions and the Small Angle Approximation . 158 B Ratio Problems 161 C Photometry of Moving Objects 165 C.1 Observing Moving Objects . 165 C.2 Aperture Correction of Moving Objects . 166 C.3 Very Fast Moving Objects . 166 D Astronomical Literature 167 8 CONTENTS Chapter 1 Photometry: What and Why Many people are interested in astronomy because it is visually exciting. The many marvelous pictures of celestial objects taken using large telescopes on the ground or in space are certainly the most visible manifestation of modern research astronomy. However, to do real science, one needs far more than pictures. Pictures are needed as a first step in classifying objects based on.
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