Improving position accuracy for telescopes with small aperture and wide field of view utilizing point spread function modelling

Abstract

ABSTRACT Telescopes with a small aperture and a wide field of view are widely used and play a significant role in large-scale state-of-the-art sky survey applications, such as transient detection and near-Earth object observations. However, owing to the specific defects caused by optical aberrations, the image quality and efficiency of source detection are affected. To achieve high-accuracy position measurements, an innovative technique is proposed. First, a large number of raw images are analysed using principal component analysis. Then, the effective point spread function is reconstructed, which reflects the state of the telescope and reveals the characteristics of the imaging process. Finally, based on the point spread function model, the centroids of star images are estimated iteratively. To test the efficiency and reliability of our algorithm, a large number of simulated images are produced, and a telescope with small aperture and wide field of view is utilized to acquire the raw images. The position measurement of sources is performed using our novel method and two other common methods on these data. Based on a comparison of the results, the improvement is investigated, and it is demonstrated that our proposed technique outperforms the others on position accuracy. We explore the limitations and potential gains that may be achieved by applying this technique to custom systems designed specifically for wide-field astronomical applications.