Photometric Analysis for the Kepler Mission: Optimal Aperture Photometry and Difference Image Analysis

Details Photometric Analysis for the Kepler Mission: Optimal Aperture Photometry and Difference Image Analysis Photometric Analysis for the Kepler Mission: Optimal Aperture Photometry and Difference Image Analysis

Dec 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006aas...20921009j&link_type=abstract

2007 AAS/AAPT Joint Meeting, American Astronomical Society Meeting 209, #210.09; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society,

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Scientific paper

The science processing pipeline for the Kepler Science Operations Center will use two different approaches for developing stellar flux time series from the pixels downlinked from the spacecraft: Difference Image Analysis (DIA) Photometry and Optimal Aperture Photometry (OAP). We have prototyped both approaches and applied them to artificial data sets containing a wealth of realistic astrophysical phenomena including transiting planets, stellar variability, background eclipsing binaries and differential velocity aberration (DVA). These data sets were furnished using the Kepler End to End Model (see Bryson et al., this session). The primary purpose of the study was to investigate the effect of DVA on the ability of the Kepler processing pipeline to: 1) obtain high precision, high fidelity stellar flux time series, 2) to detect signatures of transiting planets in the data set, and 3) to reject false positives represented by background eclipsing binary systems.
OAP photometry is an extension of the optimal pixel weighting photometry introduced by Jenkins et al. 2000 (ProcSPIE 4013) and is motivated by the slow drift of the stars on the CCDs by up to 0.6 pixels over three months compared to the tight pointing requirements for the attitude control system (0.01 = 1 σ at 15 minutes). The photometry from OAP consists of taking a weighted sum of the pixels in each target's aperture, where the weights are functions of the change in position of the target and hence, can mitigate the large apparent changes in stellar flux for simple aperture photometry. The results of the study indicate that DIA and OAP produce comparable photometric time series, and furthermore, that DVA does not interfere with the ability of Kepler to detect such planets or to reject false positives from background eclipsing binaries.
The Kepler Mission is funded by NASA's Discovery Program.

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