Open Access
2 March 2023 AIROPA IV: Validating point spread function reconstruction on various science cases
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Abstract

We present an analysis of six independent on-sky datasets taken with the Keck-II/NIRC2 instrument. Using the off-axis point spread function (PSF) reconstruction software AIROPA, we extract stellar astrometry, photometry, and other fitting metrics to characterize the performance of this package. We test the effectiveness of AIROPA to reconstruct the PSF across the field of view in varying atmospheric conditions, number and location of PSF reference stars, stellar crowding, and telescope position angle (PA). We compare the astrometric precision and fitting residuals between a static PSF model and a spatially varying PSF model that incorporates instrumental aberrations and atmospheric turbulence during exposures. Most of the fitting residuals we measure show little to no improvement in the variable-PSF mode over the single-PSF mode. For one of the data sets, we find photometric performance is significantly improved (by ∼10 × ) by measuring the trend seen in photometry as a function of off-axis location. For nearly all other metrics we find comparable astrometric and photometric precision across both PSF modes, with a ∼13 % smaller astrometric uncertainty in variable-PSF mode in the best case. We largely confirm that the spatially variable PSF does not significantly improve the astrometric and other PSF fitting residuals over the static PSF for on-sky observations. We attribute this to unaccounted instrumental aberrations that are not characterized through afternoon adaptive optics (AO) bench calibrations.

CC BY: © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.
Sean K. Terry, Jessica R. Lu, Paolo Turri, Anna Ciurlo, Abhimat K. Gautam, Tuan Do, Michael P. Fitzgerald, Andrea M. Ghez, Matthew W. Hosek Jr., and Gunther Witzel "AIROPA IV: Validating point spread function reconstruction on various science cases," Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems 9(1), 018003 (2 March 2023). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JATIS.9.1.018003
Received: 18 August 2022; Accepted: 14 February 2023; Published: 2 March 2023
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CITATIONS
Cited by 2 scholarly publications.
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KEYWORDS
Point spread functions

Stars

Astrometry

Photometry

Adaptive optics

Optical transfer functions

Data modeling

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