arXiv · astro-ph/9609143
Measuring the Atmospheric Influence on Differential Astrometry: a Simple Method Applied to Wide Field CCD Frames
Abstract
Sets of short exposure, guided CCD frames are used to measure the noise added by the atmosphere to differential astrometric observations. Large nightly variations that are correlated with the seeing have been found in the data obtained over 2 years at the KPNO and CTIO 0.9-meter telescopes. The rms noise added by the atmosphere, after a linear transformation of the raw $x,y$ data, is found to be 3 to 7 mas, normalized to 100 seconds exposure time and a field of view of 20 arcminutes near the zenith. An additional nearly constant noise (base-level) of 8.5 mas = 0.012 pixel is found for the KPNO and 6.0 mas = 0.015 pixel for the CTIO telescope. This implies that a ground-based, all sky, astrometric survey from guided CCD frames is more likely limited by the base-level noise than by the atmosphere and could reach an accuracy better than 10 mas under good seeing conditions.
Explore related subjects
Keep this discovery
Explore connections, maps & timelines
N. Zacharias. 1996-09-20. Measuring the Atmospheric Influence on Differential Astrometry: a Simple Method Applied to Wide Field CCD Frames. https://doi.org/10.1086/133847
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.