Demonstration of a Significant Improvement in the Astrometric Accuracy of HST Data

Details Demonstration of a Significant Improvement in the Astrometric Accuracy of HST Data Demonstration of a Significant Improvement in the Astrometric Accuracy of HST Data

Jun 2005

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2005acs..rept....6k&link_type=abstract

Instrument Science Report ACS 2005-06, 12 pages

Other

Hubble Space Telescope, Hst, Space Telescope Science Institute, Guide Star Catalog 2, Gsc2, Advanced Camera For Surveys, Acs, Wfpc2, Stis, Nicmos

Scientific paper

We present a demonstration of a technique that can significantly improve the absolute astrometric accuracy of HST data from its current levels of uncertainty (1-2" or worse) to an accuracy in the range about 0.1-0.3", thus representing about an order of magnitude improvement. For the first time, the absolute astrometric accuracy of HST data can thus begin to approach the exquisite 0.1" resolution of the telescope. The procedure described here involves creating catalogs of HST images, then comparing the resulting catalogs with the recently completed Guide Star Catalog 2 (GSC2), and using the cross-comparison to calculate the offsets in the astrometric header information of the image. This initial demonstration is carried out on a total of 834 science exposures that are contained in 152 different ACS/WFC associations, which are all public GO data obtained during the first year of ACS operations. With a modest amount of additional effort, this technique can be extended to single images (which generally have more cosmic rays) as well as subsets of the data from other HST instruments (WFPC2, STIS, NICMOS) that have sufficient GSC2 sources in the field. The result is a significant improvement in the scientific quality, hence the discovery potential, of HST images.

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