high speed photometry

"occult" science at LCOGT

Our newly-commissioned Lucky Imaging and High Speed Photometry (LIHSP) cameras on FTN and FTS scored a great success on June 23rd at their first attempt to collect science data, catching occulations of both Pluto and its satellite Charon from FTN!  An "occultation" is simply the transit of an object along the line of sight to a star, From occultations of Kuiper Belt Objects, you can learn about their size, and a for large one like Pluto, its atmosphere and or

The TAOS Project: High-Speed Crowded Field Aperture Photometry

We have devised an aperture photometry pipeline for data reduction of image data from the Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS). The photometry pipeline has high computational performance, and is capable of real-time photometric reduction of images containing up to 1000 stars, within the sampling rate of 5 Hz. The pipeline is optimized for both speed and signal-to-noise performance, and in the latter category it performs nearly as well as DAOPHOT. This paper provides a detailed description of the TAOS aperture photometry pipeline.
Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 121:1429–1439, 2009 December

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