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Register a new userA Calibration of NICMOS Camera 2 for Low Count-Rates
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NICMOS 2 observations are crucial for constraining distances to most of the existing sample of z > 1 SNe Ia. Unlike the conventional calibration programs, these observations involve long exposure times and low count rates. Reciprocity failure is known to exist in HgCdTe devices and a correction for this effect has already been implemented for high and medium count-rates. However observations at faint count-rates rely on extrapolations. Here instead, we provide a new zeropoint calibration directly applicable to faint sources. This is obtained via inter-calibration of NIC2 F110W/F160W with WFC3 in the low count-rate regime using z ~ 1 elliptical galaxies as tertiary calibrators. These objects have relatively simple near-IR SEDs, uniform colors, and their extended nature gives superior signal-to-noise at the same count rate than would stars. The use of extended objects also allows greater tolerances on PSF profiles. We find ST magnitude zeropoints (after the installation of the NICMOS cooling system, NCS) of 25.296 +- 0.022 for F110W and 25.803 +- 0.023 for F160W, both in agreement with the calibration extrapolated from count-rates 1,000 times larger (25.262 and 25.799). Before the installation of the NCS, we find 24.843 +- 0.025 for F110W and 25.498 +- 0.021 for F160W, also in agreement with the high-count-rate calibration (24.815 and 25.470). We also check the standard bandpasses of WFC3 and NICMOS 2 using a range of stars and galaxies at different colors and find mild tension for WFC3, limiting the accuracy of the zeropoints. To avoid human bias, our cross-calibration was blinded in that the fitted zeropoint differences were hidden until the analysis was finalized.
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Calibration precision is currently a limiting systematic in 21 cm cosmology experiments. While there are innumerable calibration approaches, most can be categorized as either `sky-based, relying on an extremely accurate model of astronomical foreground emission, or `redundant, requiring a precisely regular array with near-identical antenna response patterns. Both of these classes of calibration are inflexible to the realities of interferometric measurement. In practice, errors in the foreground model, antenna position offsets, and beam response inhomogeneities degrade calibration performance and contaminate the cosmological signal. Here we show that sky-based and redundant calibration can be unified into a highly general and physically motivated calibration framework based on a Bayesian statistical formalism. Our new framework includes sky and redundant calibration as special cases but can additionally support relaxing the rigid assumptions implicit in those approaches. Furthermore, we present novel calibration techniques such as redundant calibration for arrays with no redundant baselines, representing an alternative calibration method for imaging arrays such as the MWA Phase I. These new calibration approaches could mitigate systematics and reduce calibration error, thereby improving the precision of cosmological measurements.
We discuss two semi-independent calibration techniques used to determine the in-flight radiometric calibration for the New Horizons Multi-spectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC). The first calibration technique compares the observed stellar flux to modeled values. The difference between the two provides a calibration factor that allows the observed flux to be adjusted to the expected levels for all observations, for each detector. The second calibration technique is a channel-wise relative radiometric calibration for MVICs blue, near-infrared and methane color channels using observations of Charon and scaling from the red channel stellar calibration. Both calibration techniques produce very similar results (better than 7% agreement), providing strong validation for the techniques used. Since the stellar calibration can be performed without a color target in the field of view and covers all of MVICs detectors, this calibration was used to provide the radiometric keywords delivered by the New Horizons project to the Planetary Data System (PDS). These keywords allow each observation to be converted from counts to physical units; a description of how these keywords were generated is included. Finally, mitigation techniques adopted for the gain drift observed in the near-infrared detector and one of the panchromatic framing cameras is also discussed.
PreCam, a precursor observational campaign supporting the Dark Energy Survey (DES), is designed to produce a photometric and astrometric catalog of nearly a hundred thousand standard stars within the DES footprint, while the PreCam instrument also serves as a prototype testbed for the Dark Energy Camera (DECam)s hardware and software. This catalog represents a potential 100-fold increase in Southern Hemisphere photometric standard stars, and therefore will be an important component in the calibration of the Dark Energy Survey. We provide details on the PreCam instruments design, construction and testing, as well as results from a subset of the 51 nights of PreCam survey observations on the University of Michigan Department of Astronomys Curtis-Schmidt telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. We briefly describe the preliminary data processing pipeline that has been developed for PreCam data and the preliminary results of the instrument performance, as well as astrometry and photometry of a sample of stars previously included in other southern sky surveys.
The SST-1M is a 4-m diameter mirror Davies-Cotton gamma-ray telescope. It has been designed to cover the energy range above 500 GeV and to be part of an array of telescopes separated by 150-200 m. Its innovative camera is featuring large area hexagonal silicon photo-multipliers as photon detectors and a fully digital trigger and readout system. Here, the strategy and the methods for its calibration are presented, together with the obtained results. In particular, the off and on-site calibration strategies are demonstrated on the first camera prototype. The performances of the camera in terms of charge and time resolution are described.
The Optical Navigation Camera (ONC-T, ONC-W1, ONC-W2) onboard Hayabusa2 are also being used for scientific observations of the mission target, C-complex asteroid 162173 Ryugu. Science observations and analyses require rigorous instrument calibration. In order to meet this requirement, we have conducted extensive inflight observations during the 3.5 years of cruise after the launch of Hayabusa2 on 3 December 2014. In addition to the first inflight calibrations by Suzuki et al. (2018), we conducted an additional series of calibrations, including read-out smear, electronic-interference noise, bias, dark current, hot pixels, sensitivity, linearity, flat-field, and stray light measurements for the ONC. Moreover, the calibrations, especially flat-fields and sensitivities, of ONC-W1 and -W2 are updated for the analysis of the low-altitude (i.e., high-resolution) observations, such as the gravity measurement, touchdowns, and the descents for MASCOT and MINERVA-II payload releases. The radiometric calibration for ONC-T is also updated in this study based on star and Moon observations. Our updated inflight sensitivity measurements suggest the accuracy of the absolute radiometric calibration contains less than 1.8% error for the ul-, b-, v-, Na-, w-, and x-bands based on star calibration observations and ~5% for the p-band based on lunar calibration observations. The radiance spectra of the Moon, Jupiter, and Saturn from the ONC-T show good agreement with the spacecraft-based observations of the Moon from SP/SELENE and WAC/LROC and with ground-based telescopic observations for Jupiter and Saturn.
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