Best practices for obtaining astrometric observations from JWST (274) NIRCam data

Marco Micheli; Bryan J. Holler

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arXiv · 2608.26217

Best practices for obtaining astrometric observations from JWST (274) NIRCam data

Marco Micheli·Bryan J. Holler

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Abstract

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), with its near-infrared imager NIRCam, is capable of obtaining detections of small bodies down to what would correspond to a visual magnitude of about 31. However, the complexity of NIRCam introduces multiple subtle effects in the way the images are obtained, and they in turn affect the astrometric information that can be extracted from the images. In the following, we very briefly summarize these peculiarities, and provide some basic information on how to extract meaningful astrometric positions from NIRCam images.

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Marco Micheli, Bryan J. Holler. 2026-08-26. Best practices for obtaining astrometric observations from JWST (274) NIRCam data. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26217

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