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New package to automatise treatement of asteroid photometry (fully Python)

Presentation #212.06 in the session MBAs: Physical Characteristics (iPosters).

Published onOct 20, 2022
New package to automatise treatement of asteroid photometry (fully Python)

With the high quantity of asteroids already discovered and according to techniques used in this field, scientists need a lot of data to characterise them. Today’s data on asteroids is mainly photometry on unresolved targets. It is easy to perform with small telescopes available even to amateur astronomers, with growing degree of automatisation. According to this, huge amounts of quality data are relatively easy to produce. Difficulty for scientist now is to reliably process this amount of data. Some already existing software solutions can be used with simple tools like aperture photometry, but they are not well suited for asteroid tracking or variable seeing conditions. If asteroids are moving fast or if there are some star passages brighter than the asteroid, these apertures could lose the target. It takes a lot of time to monitor algorithms, and finally it is not possible to process much data this way. On the other hand, some attempts to automatise the process have already been developed, but with imperfect performance. (see [1]). We present a set of new python packages which automatise asteroid detec- tion and lightcurve production. Also some other features have been already added to this package to help scientists with data analysing like asteroid(s) detection, flexible aperture size, star passage detection, suppression of extreme points based of polynomial fitting, data binning etc. To evaluate it we compared it with scripts based on STARLINK packages (see [2]), which were extensively used in the past. Results are very similar, and in each tested case the package was in agreement with the results produced with STARLINK.

This work was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland, through grant no. 2020/39/O/ST9/00713

References [1] M. Mommert PHOTOMETRYPIPELINE: An Automated Pipeline for Calibrated Photometry. Astronomy and Computing, 18:47–53, January 2017. arXiv:1702.00834 [astro-ph].

[2] M.J. Currie, D.S. Berry, T. Jenness, A.G. Gibb, G.S. Bell, and P.W Draper. Starlink software in 2013. Astronomical data analysis software and systems xxiii, 485:391, 2014.

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